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Re: random doesn't feel very random


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: random doesn't feel very random
Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2012 06:19:15 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120827 Thunderbird/15.0

On 09/01/2012 12:19 AM, Achim Gratz wrote:
> On systems having a better source of entropy (like
> /dev/urandom), the init value should be taken from that source rather
> than the "mix PID with current time" hack.

This is on my list of things to do, as a gnulib project.
Among other things, I plan to use the RDRAND instruction
available on current Intel processors, as that's much
faster and better than /dev/urandom.

> allow packages to have a
> private PRNG state bound to a variable and then each call to (random)
> will advance the private state rather than the global one.

That would make sense.

Care to propose an exact API for that?  Now's a good time
to implement something like that, if we're going to do it.



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