Re: [PATCH] random.c bugfix

[Theodore Tso]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 08:50:05PM -0700, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> 
> Well, I just saw that the "in++" and "nwords * 4" patches went into -pre4.
> These are the only real non-cosmetic parts of what has been sent.  The
> other patches were not officially submitted to Linus yet (using bytes
> as parameters, and removing poolwords from the struct).  I have reverted
> those patches in my tree, and gone back to using words as units for
> add_entropy(), since it doesn't make sense to take bytes as a parameter
> and then require a multiple of 4 bytes for input sizes.

Oops, ouch.  Thanks for catching the in++ bug; I can't believe that
remained unnoticed for so long.  

Could you send me a pointer to the proposed change to remove poolwords
from the struct?  I'm not sure why that wwould be a good thing at all.

Also, the reason why add_entropy_words did stuff in multiple of 4
bytes was simply because it made the code much more efficient.
Zero-padding isn't a problem, since it's perfectly safe to mix in zero
bytes into the pool.  It is an issue for the entropy credit
calculation, but that's completely separate from add_entropy_words()....

						- Ted