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A comment on Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know: Reservoir Sampling. Parent comment

Re:Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know: Reservoir Sampling by jamiesonbecker on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @02:41PM (#9179703)
btw, your sly remark wasn't lost .. ;)

(fyi, Dr. Colin Percival is an eminent security developer for FreeBSD, author and CEO of the trusted Tarsnap, and developer of the AWS AMI's for FreeBSD; when he takes a whack at Linux's PRNG, he's got some standing to do it from :).)

But, yep, this is normal for Linux.. although, frankly, I'm just glad that we, like FreeBSD, are not taking rdrand at face value (thx Ted T'so!) Perhaps post-seed performance will improve down the road.

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Re:Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know: Reservoir Sampling by cperciva on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @06:05PM (#9180993)
I wasn't talking about RDRAND. I can't remember what throughput it gives, and it's a pain to use "live" in that it's allowed to fail and return all zeroes.

The inner loop of a PRNG microbenchmark should be identical to the inner loop of an AES-CTR microbenchmark (or your favourite block cipher or MAC if you prefer a different one) and those are fast these days.

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