Re: lib/38883: Replace the algorithm used by random (3) by the Mersenne Twister (mertwist.c)

[David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:22:56PM +0200, Alan Barrett wrote:
 > On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, David Holland wrote:
 > >  > Thus, why not implement it as the standard algorithm for random (3)
 > >  > group of calls?
 > >  
 > >  We can't (or at least shouldn't) do this because it would break the
 > >  initstate() and setstate() interface to random(3).
 > 
 > Do people really expect the kind of repatability offered by the
 > initstate/getstate interface to persist across operating system
 > upgrades?  In other words, do we guarantee that values returned by
 > initstate befoer an upgrade may be passed to setstate after an upgrade?

I'm not sure. I once came very close to writing code that did, but
that was a long time ago and used getstate() as well as setstate(),
which we don't seem to support.

 > Even if we do need to retain this level of compatibility, there seem
 > to be enough unused values in the first (int) of the state array that
 > we could encode which algorithm is used.  Old algorithms would still
 > have to work as if the old value of MAX_TYPES were retained, but it's
 > nevertheless possible to add new algotithms.

That sounds promising though, provided that it's actually worth
deploying another algorithm.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost