Myths about /dev/urandom (2014)

Re:Myths about /dev/urandom (2014) by asveikau on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @02:13PM (#22687020)

OpenBSD has the getentropy(2) syscall which is pretty much the same. There is no "flags" parameter like in Linux. But the original rationale for having it be a syscall and not a device [not having an extra open(2) call that can fail] is addressed.

arc4random_buf(3) etc. also uses getentropy(2).

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Re:Myths about /dev/urandom (2014) by beefhash on Thursday March 26, 2020 @09:40AM (#22693446)

From a practical standpoint, I agree (I've started abusing getentropy(2) as a more portable replacement), but it violates the use case though: getentropy(2) is only intended to seed userspace RNGs. Breaking the usage scenario means breaking the API contract.

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