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Re: random doesn't feel very random
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From: |
Paul Eggert |
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Subject: |
Re: random doesn't feel very random |
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Date: |
Sat, 01 Sep 2012 06:19:15 -0700 |
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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.