On Friday, 7 November 2025 11:13:28 Pacific Standard Time Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
But consider people who haven't upgraded Linux (yes, we get people asking to keep everything intact in their system, but upgrade Qt only, then complain when our dependency minimums change). How much of an impact would they have?
I suppose you could benchmark it and see if it matters. The syscall is obviously slower than the megafast vDSO code, so it will probably also be a bit slower than the MT code. But I suspect for most use cases maybe it doesn't matter that much? It's worth a try and seeing if anybody complains.
I'm not asking about the performance of generating new random numbers in this process.
I am asking about the system-wide impact that draining the entropy source would have. Is that a bad thing?
I suspect the answer is "no" because it's the same as /dev/urandom anyway.