[Cryptography] randomness +- entropy

[Matt Johnston]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 06:09:49PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> I could add an ioctl which returns the state of the pool initialized
> flag, or which blocked until the pool is considered initialized, but
> I'm not convinced that enough programs would really use it.  And if I

As a small data point, I'd use it. At first boot a SSH
server could slowly poll the ioctl in the background until
it's ready, then generate host keys. Saves having a delay on
first connection which will lead to mystified users.

I don't know if it would get used at a system level - for
upstart/systemd/whatever they'd probably prefer something
they wait for asynchronously?

Of course the systems that most need it probably won't get a
bleeding edge kernel for quite a while :-\

Cheers,
Matt
Dropbear SSH developer