>>>>> "Valeriy" == Valeriy E Ushakov <uwe@ptc.spbu.ru> writes:

    Valeriy> On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 02:58:25 +0300, Valeriy
    Valeriy> E. Ushakov wrote:
    >> Dunno...  Try enabling RND_VERBOSE in sys/dev/rnd.c
    >> 
    >> rnd(4) only returns ENXIO if it's not inited or the minor is
    >> wrong.

    Valeriy> *sigh* stupid me.

    Valeriy> revision 1.47 date: 2005/04/15 20:21:23; author:
    Valeriy> drochner; state: Exp; lines: +3 -18 Don't ENXIO on
    Valeriy> open("/dev/random") if there is not enough entropy
    Valeriy> collected. It's undocumented, noone else does it and it
    Valeriy> leads to "named" errors during boot for me.  Generally,
    Valeriy> consumers of "/dev/random" should be prepared to wait.
    Valeriy> (The other uses of "rnd_have_entropy" look bogus to me
    Valeriy> too, but this needs more consideration.)

    Valeriy> And this is not pulled up to 3.0.

Ah ha! At least there's a reason for all this then.

It appears that there's nothing stopping me applying the same change
to my local (netbsd 2.1) copy of rnd.c, am I correct?

What defines which devices are used for entropy collection, and what's
the approved way of amending that set of devices?
My diskless Sparc only uses the CDROM drive, as noted in my previous
post, which isn't great.


-- 
Barrie J. Bremner
netbsd [at] barriebremner.com     http://barriebremner.com/