SUMMARY of Solaris random gatherer options (long)

[Sam Roberts]

Previously, you (Nils Ellmenreich) wrote:
> Proposal
> 
> I'd like to see GnuPG being a bit more flexible on this issue and
> therefore avoiding the need to patch it. I think that taking the OpenSSH
> approach (testing for existence and readability of /dev/random and
> /dev/urandom, being still happy if the latter doesn't exist, and don't
> test the type of the device; suggest the use of egd if the devices don't
> exist) should be OK for GnuPG as well. The naming of these random
> gatheres as being "linux" is a bit unfortunate, but that's just
> cosmetics :-)
> 
> Any comments?

I'd like to second this proposal, particularly about not forcing
/dev/random to be a character device.

I ported Linux's random to QNX4 and Nto, and I took the approach of
making them look like character devices so gpg would recognize them.
I don't really think they are, any term control ops on them would fail,
a named pipe or a QNX named device would have been more natural. The
term linux will be increasingly a misnomer, I believe the *BSDs have a
/dev/random as well, for instance.
 
Sam

--
Sam Roberts (sam at cogent.ca), Cogent Real-Time Systems (www.cogent.ca)
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