[Python-Dev] BDFL ruling request: should we block forever waiting for high-quality random bits?

[Christian Heimes]

On 2016-06-09 19:14, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2016 at 12:39:00PM -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:
> 
>> There are three options for what do with os.urandom by default:
>>
>> * Allow it to silently return data that may or may not be 
>> cryptographically secure based on what the state of the urandom pool 
>> initialization looks like.
> 
> Just to be clear, this is only an option on Linux, right? All the other 
> major platforms block, whatever we decide to do on Linux. Including 
> Windows?

To best of my knowledge, Windows and OSX are already initialized when
Python is started. On other BSD platforms it is possible to get the
seeding state through the proc file system.