[onerng talk] RNG designs

[Jim Cheetham]

On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Paul Campbell <paul at taniwha.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 01 Feb 2014 22:44:58 ianG wrote:
>> >> 1.  Ideally, I would treat the device as two separate Collectors and read
>> >> it the diode part separately from the RF stream.

If this is essentially a software argument, then it's just a case of
arguing for the feature set of the default firmware; instead of trying
to meet every use-case in one go, we can still make a useful release
by choosing one set of features.

>> Perhaps standardise and say that the 0 feed is always the mix, and feeds
>> 1,2,...n are sources 1,2,3...n.
>
> I like that idea - 3 streams - we'll be careful not to cross them - stream 0
> can be the combined one as well as the command stream
>
> I'm a bit worried though that udev scripts may not be able to be convinced to
> do the right thing - we may be better with 1 stream and a user controlled mux
> (what we have now)

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.

This is all software/firmware we're talking about, isn't it?

-jim