Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 19:19:05 -0800 (PST) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org> Cc: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com>, Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za>, obrien@FreeBSD.ORG, Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.ORG>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/etc crontab rc src/etc/defaults rc.conf src/etc/mtree BSD.root.dist src/libexec Makefile src/libexec/save-entropy Makefile save-entropy.sh Message-ID: <200101120319.f0C3J5w90928@earth.backplane.com> References: <200101120131.f0C1VK980630@earth.backplane.com> <19283.979245383@winston.osd.bsdi.com> <200101112222.f0BMMNs75120@harmony.village.org> <200101120305.f0C35gs77450@harmony.village.org>
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:Why bother? Is there something in the mount_* functions that need
:that randomness? Wouldn't extra sources just be wasted effort? I'd
:only use them when we can't locate a entroy file. Am I missing
:something?
Hey, if it's easy...
The only reason newfs needs random numbers is to initialize the
filesystem id in the superblock and the file generation number
in the inode.
The file generation number is used as part of a file handle. It is
both a security feature and a method which allows NFS to determine
if the file handle supplied by a client is stale or not (refers to
a file that was previously deleted rather then the file now occupying
the inode).
There is no security or reboot/consistency issue with MFS because
MFS is transitory and not normally exported via NFS. So we don't
need strong randomness when doing a mount_mfs.
-Matt
:: Then we don't have to worry about special casing any codebases in the
:: tree.
:
:Exactly.
:
:Warner
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