From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263285AbTJUUFj (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:05:39 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263293AbTJUUFj (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:05:39 -0400 Received: from tmr-02.dsl.thebiz.net ([216.238.38.204]:5636 "EHLO gatekeeper.tmr.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263285AbTJUUFd (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:05:33 -0400 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Path: gatekeeper.tmr.com!davidsen From: davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen) Newsgroups: mail.linux-kernel Subject: Re: [RFC] frandom - fast random generator module Date: 21 Oct 2003 19:55:32 GMT Organization: TMR Associates, Schenectady NY Message-ID: References: <3F8E552B.3010507@users.sf.net> <3F8E58A9.20005@cyberone.com.au> <3F8E70E0.7070000@users.sf.net> <3F8E8101.70009@pobox.com> X-Trace: gatekeeper.tmr.com 1066766132 18908 192.168.12.62 (21 Oct 2003 19:55:32 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@tmr.com Originator: davidsen@gatekeeper.tmr.com Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In article <3F8E8101.70009@pobox.com>, Jeff Garzik wrote: | Eli Billauer wrote: | > Besides, it's quite easy to do something wrong with random numbers. By | > having a good source of random data, I suppose we can spare a lot of | > people the headache of getting their own user-space application right | > for the one-off thing they want to do. | | This is completely bogus logic. I can use this (incorrect) argument to | similar push for applications doing bsearch(3) or qsort(3) via a system | call. Your argument is correct, but this is data generation rather than analysis. In doing simulation it's desirable to ensure that multiple instances of a program don't use the same numbers. For instance, simulating user load against a server; I want the simulation of human thinking time to be a number in the range n..m and not to be the same for all threads. Sure I can get around that, and do, but I wouldn't mind having a simple source of random bytes which was quality PRNG and unique. Again, this is not a case that this is a "must have" feature, just an opinion that there are benefits to having such a feature which don't apply to the cases you cited above. -- bill davidsen CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.