Long ago, before Darwin was sent to OpenDarwin.org (much longer than after Apple took it back), Apple DID have a world-viewable bug tracker.
I searched through it, trolling for indications my pet peeves were being fixed, and it was interesting. The bug that there was no /dev/random was originally scoffed at by Apple engineers until wsanchez explained it was a serious issue, and that crypto tools depended on it. Then, there was a discussion of how to implement it. Apple decided against using the FreeBSD /dav/random in favor of a home-grown Yarrow-based implementation that is non-blocking (but is willing to hand out more entropy than it really has, whoops).
I'm not sure what Apple is doing with /dev/random going forward, but the last time I checked the source /dev/random used entropy periodically scavenged from SecurityServer ... on a schedule that was independent of /dev/random's actual entropy consumption by users. Also, there's no actual difference between random and urandom on Darwin the last time I looked.
You could follow each developer's post, see where each one wanted to go ... it was very interesting.
You could also find annoying unsolved crashers languishing. Could be an embarrassment. I fully understand Apple shutting down public access to the live bug tracker, especially in light of secrecy related to upcoming hardware, etc. Live code access is just too hard to screen for "secrets".
by Oldster — May 09
I searched through it, trolling for indications my pet peeves were being fixed, and it was interesting. The bug that there was no /dev/random was originally scoffed at by Apple engineers until wsanchez explained it was a serious issue, and that crypto tools depended on it. Then, there was a discussion of how to implement it. Apple decided against using the FreeBSD /dav/random in favor of a home-grown Yarrow-based implementation that is non-blocking (but is willing to hand out more entropy than it really has, whoops).
I'm not sure what Apple is doing with /dev/random going forward, but the last time I checked the source /dev/random used entropy periodically scavenged from SecurityServer ... on a schedule that was independent of /dev/random's actual entropy consumption by users. Also, there's no actual difference between random and urandom on Darwin the last time I looked.
You could follow each developer's post, see where each one wanted to go ... it was very interesting.
You could also find annoying unsolved crashers languishing. Could be an embarrassment. I fully understand Apple shutting down public access to the live bug tracker, especially in light of secrecy related to upcoming hardware, etc. Live code access is just too hard to screen for "secrets".
Ahh, the good ol' days.