Re: [PATCH] random: add blocking facility to urandom

Mark Brown
2011-09-12T17:07:11Z

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 10:02:43AM -0400, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> Ted Ts'o wrote:

> >Yeah, but there are userspace programs that depend on urandom not
> >blocking... so your proposed change would break them.

> I'm already consigned to the fact this isn't going to fly, but I'm
> still curious to know examples of programs that are going to break
> here, for my own education. Its already possible for urandom reads
> to fail as the code is now (-ERESTARTSYS and -EFAULT are possible),
> so a sane program ought to already be handling error cases, though
> not -EAGAIN, which this would add.

It's not just a question of error handling existing, it's also about the
expectations the system has for the behaviour of the file - if urandom
is expected to always be able to return data an application is likely to
rely on the fact that it's effectively non-blocking anyway and not bother
setting non-blocking mode at all and so have no graceful handling for
this.