Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 25 Sep 2015 16:24:25 -0400 | From | Theodore Ts'o <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 1/3] Make /dev/urandom scalable |
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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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