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Re:Entropy and the NetBSD Kernel by dfox on Sunday May 17, 2020 @10:48AM (#23212372)
As long as you use reasonably secure way to add entropy into the pool, ie. don't XOR stuff into some kind of pool buffer but use something that at least partly resembles secure hash even for adding entropy (as using full-blown SHA-x to process interrupt timings and similar high volume low quality entropy sources is not exactly practical due to both performance and synchronization issues).

Also, total entropy is not necessarily the same thing as attacker's uncertainity of the pool's state. The difference seems mostly theoretical, but there are practical issues for both cases of these two quantities beeing wildy different.

Re:Entropy and the NetBSD Kernel by loeg on Sunday May 17, 2020 @07:33PM (#23216548)
+1 on the mix-with-SHA or something like it paragraph.

Re: Entropy; in a system RNG design, entropy is typically considered relative to an attacker. In some very real sense, the "total entropy" of the system is only the unpredictability of the generator to the most knowledgeable attacker.