[dsfjdssdfsd] getentropy(2)

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

Dear all,

The absence of getentropy(2) on Linux is a major pain point for
everyone. It turns out that chroot jails are not compatible with
/dev/urandom. which doesn't work on linux anyway (because it will
return junk before initialization). As a TLS developer myself
(slowly!) I feel that pain: random number generation is the single
nastiest problem I have to deal with.

Yes, this is different from the usual IETF standard. But application
and library developers need a portable way to get entropy, and that
has to be the same across all platforms, work every time. Nothing
short of a standard system call will work. Perhaps there is a more
appropriate venue like the Open Group or POSIX or the Cxx committee
(no doubt C++ will happily adopt it: a feature not in C++ is always a
bug).

That's all I need: a platform and hardware independent means to get
some random numbers.

Sincerely,
Watson Ladd