Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)yahoo.com.au> writes:
On Sat, 2010-08-21 at 23:43 -0500, Thomas Cameron wrote:
> I've always heard that you can get faster random numbers by generating
> a lot of interrupts. I usually do something like
> run /etc/cron.daily/mlocate to generate a lot of disk activity.
I've always wondered whether that would provide it with real random
seeding, or seeding with a pattern that might be determinable. After
all, you're basing it on the disk contents.
Now that you mention it, I wonder how that works too.
The inter-interupt timing for the disk will probably also be quite
biased. Interrupts that come at a one per sector rate will probably
have strong spikes in their probability functions for "(rotation-time /
number-of-sectors-per-track)". Even with disk zones, there probably
won't be that many different sectors-per-track values.
-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht
http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/ (IPv6-only)