Re: you won't believe this.

Eric Hanchrow <offby1@blarg.net> writes:

> >>>>> "Ben" == Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman@collab.net> writes:
>
> >> Really dumb question time: does FreeBSD have some equivalent of
> >> Linux's non-blocking rng?
>
> Ben> Sure. /dev/urandom.
>
> OK, let me further enrich the dumbness: would not using /dev/urandom
> solve the problem? I imagine not, or else you'd already be using it;
> in which case the question becomes: why not?

The problem is that APR's ./configure looks for /dev/random as a first
preference, then /dev/urandom. On Linux and FreeBSD, it will
therefore always find /dev/random first, and poof, you now have a
(potentially) blocking svn_repos_create() function.

The discussion on APR has been to complexify the
apr_generate_random_bytes() interface. In theory, APR could make use
of *both* /dev/random and /dev/urandom, and the caller of the function
could indicate whether quality or non-blockage is wanted.

I'll probably take this discussion over to the APR list. :-)

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Received on Mon Apr 14 22:15:26 2003