Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer@informatik.fh-regensburg.de> writes:

> > A syscall for that would be a bad idea.
> 
> Why - because passing the ammount of data between userland and kernel and
> back is too much overhead?

For one, random() is repeatable, so you'd have to maintain per-process
state for it.  That would be silly to do, rather than having it in
libc.

As for passing in data to be md5() hashed, that is still pretty silly,
as this is what userland is for.

Replicating the code in every binary (via libc) and in the kernel
really is a good idea in both of those cases.

--Michael