Re: random() in kernel

Kevin M Bealer (kmb203@psu.edu)
Thu, 30 May 1996 08:17:21 -0400 (EDT)


On Mon, 27 May 1996, Pedro Roque Marques wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> I need to obtain random numbers in the kernel, to be more clear i'm
> looking for statistic random numbers. Since there are a lot of people
> out there that got some handly algorithms i would like a pointer to
> them. The generator doesn't need to be very good, size and speed are
> major concerns. The reason why the phisical event counter based
> entropy is not too good for my purposes is that the generator will be
> called right after system initialization and the fact that the
> objective is obtaining equally distributed numbers.
>
> What is in question here is the right time to send packets to the
> network to avoid colisions.
>
> ./Pedro.

You can use dd to pull a 1k block from /dev/urandom at startup and save it
to a file, and you can cat file > /dev/random to 'seed' the generator... I
think it's described more in the /usr/src/linux/*/random.c wherever it is.

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