[onerng talk] RNG designs

[ianG]

On 2/02/14 10:27 AM, Paul Campbell wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Feb 2014 14:39:31 Jim Cheetham wrote:
>> If the streams come from different /dev/tty devices that wouldn't
>> matter; but as it stands if we default to delivering the mixed feed
>> that makes us useful; people wanting to look at the individual sources
>> are not going to be able to continue consuming data for their OS at
>> the same time anyway.
> 
> yes I'd prefer that the default behaviour did something useful (ie it's a 
> stream the drng will consume without complaint)


Right.  I agree that the goal is to do the best possible thing it can do
as a default, the easiest way it can be used.

Usability is the key to success.  The rest is noise, in comparison.

Which would be to have the mix do the best job at /dev/xxx0.  For most
users, most of the time, they will be challenged just to get the thing
up and going with one feed.

(Which reminds me, I think I saw somewhere that linux expects the
additional devices to pop up on /dev/rand/xxx or some such convention.
I have no idea how that happens tho.)


> even if it's not 'perfect' in 
> some form - personally I think the RF noise source is somewhat more "suspect", 
> I don't think it should be part of the default


I'm curious about that too.  I'm not sure about dropping it tho.  Either
way, it doesn't matter that much.  First, let's get something.


>> This is all software/firmware we're talking about, isn't it?
> 
> firmware (we can't really change this for most users after we ship)  - so far 
> I'm not planning on writing any host side software (other than maybe a udev 
> script)


Good!  What do you mean by a udev script?

Ah.  This is the script that creates the device nodes.  Got it.  Oh,
deep dark memories coming back...



iang