[Cryptography] cheap sources of entropy

Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com
Sun Feb 2 23:36:04 EST 2014


My experience with working on several OS kernels is that OS 
scheduling is a black art. Its a lot more arcane than cryptography.

If I were working on the scheduler for a modern VM hypervisor, I 
would spend considerable effort trying to maximize the 
efficiency of the L1 and L2 caches. Disk I/O just doesn't count. 
If you have to wait for a disk operation, you're in a long-term 
penalty box.

Now, if you can measure program execution time accurately enough 
to determine the L1 and L2 cache misses, they might be a good 
source of bits unknown to outside observers. :-)

Cheers - Bill

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