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Author vstinner
Recipients Lukasa, Theodore Tso, christian.heimes, dstufft, larry, lemburg, martin.panter, ncoghlan, vstinner
Date 2016-06-09.08:08:52
SpamBayes Score -1.0
Marked as misclassified Yes
Message-id <1465459732.15.0.379597736152.issue27266@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
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Martin:
> I wonder what we should do on Linux if /dev/urandom is unavailable and getrandom() would block.

os.urandom(block=False) should raise BlockingIOError if getrandom(GRND_NONBLOCK) fails with EAGAIN and /dev/urandom is not available.

Larry:
> I don't think that happens. getrandom() actually supports two flags.  The flag GRND_RANDOM tells it "behave like /dev/random".  If you don't pass in GRND_RANDOM, it behaves like "/dev/urandom".  So it's hard to imagine that you could have getrandom() and not have /dev/urandom.

You can imagine a "badly configured" container or chroot where /dev or only /dev/urandom doesn't exist.

When I played with chroot, it was easy to forget /dev/urandom. Since Python uses getrandom() on Linux since Python 3.5, you can imagine that a Python 3.5 user may not notice the lack of /dev/urandom in the common case (urandom initialized), but start to get errors when the container runs before urandom is initialized.
History
Date User Action Args
2016-06-09 08:08:52vstinnersetrecipients: + vstinner, lemburg, ncoghlan, larry, christian.heimes, martin.panter, dstufft, Lukasa, Theodore Tso
2016-06-09 08:08:52vstinnersetmessageid: <1465459732.15.0.379597736152.issue27266@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
2016-06-09 08:08:52vstinnerlinkissue27266 messages
2016-06-09 08:08:52vstinnercreate