Re: [PATCH 1/3] Make /dev/urandom scalable

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 03:07:54PM -0400, Austin S Hemmelgarn wrote:
> 
> Interestingly, based on what dieharder is already saying about performance,
> /dev/urandom is slower than AES_OFB (at least, on this particular system,
> happy to provide hardware specs if someone wants).

Yeah, not surprised by that.  We're currently using a crypto hash
instead of AES, which means we're not doing any kind of hardware
acceleration.

Crazy applications that want to spend 100% of the CPU generating
random numbers instead of you know, doing _useful_ work
notwithstanding, /dev/urandom never had high performance as one of its
design goals.  The assumption was that if you needed that kind of
performance, you would use a user-space cryptographic random number
generator.


					- Ted
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