Messages in this thread | | | Date | 23 Jul 2014 07:52:53 -0400 | From | "George Spelvin" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH, RFC] random: introduce getrandom(2) system call |
| |
I keep wishing for a more general solution. For example, some way to have a "spare" extra fd that could be accessed with a special O_NOFAIL flag.
That would allow any number of library functions to not fail, such as logging from nasty corner cases.
But you'd have to provide one per thread, and block non-fatal signals while it was open, so you don't get reentrancy problems. Ick.
This overly-specialized system call (and worse yet, a blocking system call that you can't put into a poll() loop) just feels ugly to me. Is it *absolutely* necessary?
For example, how about simply making getentropy() a library function that aborts if it can't open /dev/urandom? If you're suffering fd exhaustion, you're being DoSed already.
| |