Re: [PATCH, RFC] random: introduce getrandom(2) system call

Hi Ted, yeah I understand the reasoning, it would be good if there was
a way to influence the various libc people to
ensure they manage to provide a getentropy().


On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 11:01 AM, Theodore Ts'o [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 09:12:15AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 05:18:15AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

quoted

The getrandom(2) system call was requested by the LibreSSL Portable
developers.  It is analoguous to the getentropy(2) system call in
OpenBSD.

What's the reason to not implement exactly the same system call OpenBSD
does?  Having slightly different names and semantics for the same
functionality is highly annoying.

The getrandom(2) system call is a superset of getentropy(2).  When we
add the support for this into glibc, it won't be terribly difficult
nor annoying to drop the following in alongside the standard support
needed for any new system call:

int getentropy(void *buf, size_t buflen)
{
        int     ret;

        ret = getentropy(buf, buflen, 0);
        return (ret > 0) ? 0 : ret;
}

The reason for the additional flags is that I'm trying to solve more
problems than just getentropy()'s raison d'etre.  The discussion of
this is in the commit description; let me know if there bits that I
could make clearer.

Cheers,

                                        - Ted