[Python-Dev] BDFL ruling request: should we block forever waiting for high-quality random bits?
Theodore Ts'o
tytso at mit.edu
Mon Jun 13 08:26:54 EDT 2016
On Sun, Jun 12, 2016 at 06:53:54PM -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>
> Speaking of full-stack perspectives, would it affect your decision if
> Debian Stretch were made robust against blocking /dev/urandom on
> AWS/GCE? Because I think we could find lots of people who would be
> overjoyed to fix Stretch before the next merge window even opens
> (AFAICT the quick fix is literally a 1 line patch), if that allowed
> the blocking /dev/urandom patches to go in upstream...
Alas, it's not just Debian. Apparently it breaks the boot on Openwrt
as well as Ubuntu Quantal:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/6/13/48
https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/5/31/599
(Yay for an automated test infrastructure that fires off as soon as
you push to an externally visible git repository. :-)
I haven't investigated to see exactly *why* it's blowing up on these
userspace setups, but it's a great reminder for why changing an
established interface is something that has to be done very carefully
indeed.
- Ted
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