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[82.69.66.36]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id 5b1f17b1804b1-4854b5f6bb4sm111774365e9.4.2026.03.12.01.38.54 (version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256/256); Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:38:55 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:38:53 +0000 From: David Laight To: Eric Biggers Cc: Christoph Hellwig , Andrew Morton , Richard Henderson , Matt Turner , Magnus Lindholm , Russell King , Catalin Marinas , Will Deacon , Huacai Chen , WANG Xuerui , Madhavan Srinivasan , Michael Ellerman , Nicholas Piggin , "Christophe Leroy (CS GROUP)" , Paul Walmsley , Palmer Dabbelt , Albert Ou , Alexandre Ghiti , Heiko Carstens , Vasily Gorbik , Alexander Gordeev , Christian Borntraeger , Sven Schnelle , "David S. Miller" , Andreas Larsson , Richard Weinberger , Anton Ivanov , Johannes Berg , Thomas Gleixner , Ingo Molnar , Borislav Petkov , Dave Hansen , x86@kernel.org, "H. Peter Anvin" , Herbert Xu , Dan Williams , Chris Mason , David Sterba , Arnd Bergmann , Song Liu , Yu Kuai , Li Nan , Theodore Ts'o , "Jason A. Donenfeld" , linux-alpha@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, loongarch@lists.linux.dev, linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org, linux-riscv@lists.infradead.org, linux-s390@vger.kernel.org, sparclinux@vger.kernel.org, linux-um@lists.infradead.org, linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org, linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org, linux-raid@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 26/27] random: factor out a __limit_random_u32_below helper Message-ID: <20260312083853.01dc18d3@pumpkin> In-Reply-To: <20260311222935.GA3161@quark> References: <20260311070416.972667-1-hch@lst.de> <20260311070416.972667-27-hch@lst.de> <20260311222935.GA3161@quark> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 4.1.1 (GTK 3.24.38; arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf) Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:29:35 -0700 Eric Biggers wrote: > On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 08:03:58AM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > > Factor out the guts of __get_random_u32_below into a new helper, > > so that callers with their own prng state can reuse this code. > > > > Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig > > I think I'd prefer that the test just uses the mod operation instead, > like many of the existing tests do: > > prandom_u32_state(&rng) % ceil Or possibly what the old code used: (prandom_u32_state(&rnd) * (u64)ceil) >> 32 Which distributes the values evenly across the range although some values happen 1 more time than others. I suspect that is good enough for a lot of the users of the cryptographic random number generator as well. David > > Yes, when ceil isn't a power of 2 the result isn't uniformly > distributed. But that's perfectly fine for these tests, especially with > the values of ceil being used being far smaller than U32_MAX. > > There's been an effort to keep the cryptographic random number generator > (drivers/char/random.c and include/linux/random.h) separate from the > non-cryptographic random number generator (lib/random32.c and > include/linux/prandom.h). This patch feels like it's going in a > slightly wrong direction, where random.c gains a function that's used > with both cryptographic and non-cryptographic random numbers. > > And if someone actually needs a fully unform distribution, then they'd > probably want cryptographic random numbers as well. > > So I'm not sure the proposed combination of "fully uniform > non-cryptographic random numbers" makes much sense. > > Plus the '% ceil' implementation is much easier to understand. > > - Eric >