On Wednesday 27 June 2007 15:05:33 Michael Buesch wrote: > On Wednesday 27 June 2007 04:48:56 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > > (a) is just broken, unless one is to take it as "never use it". And I am > > really not sure about (b). It *is* better than just using whatever crap we > > found first (or last), but it is the wrong solution for a problem that we > > really should not have in the first place if someone had thought a bit > > before adding a misc device for something that has no reason to be unique in > > a system. > > Well, we have that userspace ABI of one hwrng char device. I did not > invent that. It's kind of broken, yes. > And changing it in a compatible way is probably difficult. > > > Instead of papering over the problem with borked solutions, maybe we should > > just export ALL HRNGs to userspace. While at it, please add whatever is > > And then we would _still_ export some kind of hint for rngd that > the CPU rng device should be preferred over the bcm43xx device. > rngd needs some basic hint about the devices. > How would you implement that? (We're back to my TYPE_XXX definitions ;) ) > > > needed so that userspace can talk to the kernel driver to get vital > > information about the HRNG device the driver might have (the current > > interface is a bad simplistic hack). > > What is "vital information"? My TYPE_XXX categories? ;) > > > Let userspace get the data from whichever HRNG it wants, process it in any > > It _can_. We can switch the RNG in sysfs. So userspace _can_ get data > from whichever HWRNG it wants. > > > way it wants and pipe it back through /dev/random IOCTLs. And let it do it > > for as many HRNGs it wants at the same time. > > That's an improvement, yes. > > > And if you must have /dev/hw_random point somewhere, let udev scripts or > > something else like that take care of it. > > Could do that, yes. > >
Oh, and eh, if we _are_ really going to redesign the userspace interface to show each RNG to userspace, we should merge my TYPE_XXX patch before that nevertheless, as it fixes (works around) a real bug (IMO). -- Greetings Michael. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/