On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 10:54 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: > > On 1/20/19 7:52 AM, Rawiri Blundell wrote: > > > So it might be a case of restricting the usability of this change to > > newer kernels that have dedicated calls like getrandom() or > > getentropy(), and having to handle detecting/selecting those? > > > > So if this is an exercise that you're happy to entertain, and without > > wanting to feature-creep too much, why not something like this? > > I'd probably start with URANDOM as a 32-bit random integer read as > four bytes from /dev/urandom. It's trivial to create a filename from > that with whatever restrictions (and whatever characters) you want. >
For what it's worth I did consider suggesting URANDOM, however I figured some users may confuse it like this: RANDOM -> /dev/random URANDOM -> /dev/urandom Couple that with an established base of myths about /dev/urandom, I thought it might be best to suggest something else to eliminate that potential confusion. (SRANDOM was another one I considered, has a bit of awk familiarity to it...) > > As an aside, I can confirm the findings of a performance difference > > between 4.4 and 5.0 when running the script provided earlier in the > > discussion. At first glance it seems to be due to the switch from the > > old LCG to the current MINSTD RNG, > > There's no switch: the bash-4.4 generator and bash-5.0 generators are > identical. I'll have to do some profiling when I get a chance. > I suspect that we're talking at cross purposes, but it's now neither here nor there. You've expressed that RANDOM's period and seeding are issues for you. I think the ChaCha20 patch is a bit overkill for RANDOM's requirements, but would you be interested in some investigation into middle-ground alternatives like PCG or JSF32? Rawiri
