Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Mon, 13 May 1996 18:51:02 +0300 (EET DST) | From | Johan Myréen <> | Subject | Re: CONFIG_RANDOM option for 1.99.2 |
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On Mon, 13 May 1996, Paul Gortmaker wrote:
> The random device is a fairly useful thing to have (I use it for > input values to "crashme" ;-) but there lots of people who don't > use it for anything. For those people, it would be useful to have a > CONFIG_RANDOM option, so that they can save a bit of space, and avoid > the small overhead associated with all the add_XXX_randomness() calls.
True, but how do people (end users) know if they use it for something or not? How do distribution makers know whether their customers are going to use it?
In general I see a problem with Linux that application software developers face: how can you be sure if the end user's copy of Linux contains a configurable feature? An application program writer will have to choose the smallest common demominator => there goes /dev/random.
Now, in the case of /dev/random this is perhaps not a big problem, the application (or libc) writer can work around the problem by checking first if /dev/random can be opened, and revert to other means if not. But if the Linux kernel is made too configurable, we're headed for trouble. For example, if a developers asks if Linux supports System V IPC:
- "Weeelll, yes and no. It depends..." - "It depends on what?" - "It depends on whether the user or the user's distribution vendor has configured the kernel with SYSV IPC enabled." - "Forget it. I am not gonna use it."
Configuration options like these are good, if you want to use Linux for special applications on small machines, for example. But I think they should be enabled by default, and perhaps marked "recommended". Or maybe we need a list of standard features that should be enabled in distributed kernels. Otherwise we'll might end up with a less solid base for developers to build upon.
Johan Myreen
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