Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Question: how does /dev/urandom ensure that two different users, both reading from the stream, don't get the same output?

(ignoring that they could get the same output by chance)

View on HN

`/dev/urandom` isn't a real file / stream. It's part of the 'everything is a a file' *nix mantra. Even if two users are reading from /dev/urandom simultaneously, they'll each get unique values. The CSPRNG keeps track of a sequence number and so you'll end up with something like [process 0 requests sequence 0, process 1 requests sequence 1, process 1 requests sequence 2, proceess 0 requests sequence 3...].

Um, yeah, you sort of rephrased my question into a statement.

There is (or at least was, in 2014) a spinlock to serialize access: https://damonsnyder.com/2014/04/16/linux-dev-urandom-and-con...

Is that strictly true? I know urandom doesn't block if it lacked entropy, but if it had entropy I was under the impression urandom's output was derived from that instead.

Edited my post to include a link with code references and discussion by kernel devs. The RNG state is protected by a spinlock.

Well, a lot changed since the article. For one the test tool now eats more CPU than RNG.

From my dumb tests (run DD in one, then many threads), the 4 thread run have 4x the performance of single thread one (I have 4 core CPU), while 16 thread one have predictably same-ish total throughput, so if there are any serialization still there it is not noticeable much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com