svn commit: r239598 - head/etc/rc.d

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2012-Sep-04 15:59:45 -0700, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>I'm not sure I agree with that, since the combination of lower quality
>input (the boilerplate) and higher quality (changing numbers) still
>provides more bits to stir the pool with. Even though the average
>quality is lower over the total number of bits I still think it's
>probably more valuable to pump in the higher quantity given the internal
>chewing that Yarrow does with the bits.

I don't understand the point of feeding boilerplate into Yarrow.  Yes,
it will stir Yarrow's internal state but it does so in a predictable
way so it doesn't add any entropy.

On the downside, it doesn't appear to be possible to queue more than
4KB of input every 100msec - excess input is just discarded.  This
implies that feeding boilerplate into /dev/random just increases the
probability that real entropy will be discarded.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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