Messages in this thread | | | From | (bill davidsen) | Subject | Re: [RFC] frandom - fast random generator module | Date | 21 Oct 2003 19:55:32 GMT |
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In article <3F8E8101.70009@pobox.com>, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> 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 <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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