>This patch solves a problem where simultaneous reads to /dev/urandom can cause two processes on different processors to get the same value. We're not using a spinlock around the random generation loop because this will be a huge hit to preempt latency. So instead we just use a mutex around random_read and urandom_read. Yeah, it's not as efficient in the case of contention, if an application is calling /dev/urandom a huge amount, it's there's something really misdesigned with it, and we don't want to optimize for stupid applications.
>This patch solves a problem where simultaneous reads to /dev/urandom can cause two processes on different processors to get the same value. We're not using a spinlock around the random generation loop because this will be a huge hit to preempt latency. So instead we just use a mutex around random_read and urandom_read. Yeah, it's not as efficient in the case of contention, if an application is calling /dev/urandom a huge amount, it's there's something really misdesigned with it, and we don't want to optimize for stupid applications.