Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 18 Aug 2002 10:08:31 -0500 | From | Oliver Xymoron <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] (0/4) Entropy accounting fixes |
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On Sun, Aug 18, 2002 at 11:30:05AM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > Its probably true there are low bits of randomness available from such > sources providing we know the machine has a tsc, unless the I/O APIC is > clocked at a divider of the processor clock in which case our current > behaviour is probably much saner.
I actually looked at this a bit for embedded applications - there's a technique for pulling entropy from free-running clock skew.
Unfortunately with modern chipsets, just about all clocks are generated from a single source these days. This is even true in the non-x86 world now. Any extra clocks you have are likely to be out in peripheral-land and too slow (serial port) or too inaccessible (VGA dot clocks) to be interesting.
> With modern systems that have real RNG's its a non issue.
Thankfully.
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