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SubjectRe: Update to the /dev/random driver
Date
From
...
> "Cacheing" some random bytes will help, as we don't do this internally
> in the random driver today.
...

This seems like a good place to bring up an idea I have intermittently
considered. I have wondered why we don't put the idle task to work a little
better. If processes could register themselves to be called only when the
system would otherwise do useful work, (or when specifically called), then they
could do probable look-ahead work.

An example can be shown with random_bytes. Normally we don't cache any, but
why not? As Ted stated, the crypto function dominates the time, so generating
two random bytes when only one was called for will not give us much benefit
except for the calling overhead. However, having a few bytes around for the
next call in advance would make the calling overhead the limiting factor. The
time to process such compute-intensive processes is when we have nothing
better to do. Then we squirrel them away for later.

There are probably other processes that could benefit from otherwise idle
time.

I make this distinction versus the concept of nice-ing a process. For example,
the RC5 process on my system still takes up too much of my useful CPU time. I
only want some things working when I have *nothing* else to do.

Any comments?

Regards,
Billy Harvey



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