Re: [PATCH] Improve mutt's random data generator.

On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 02:10:31PM +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
> Use getrandom() if available, or else arc4random_buf().  Only fall
> back to using the built-in PRNG if those aren't found on the system.
> 
> For the sizes of data mutt typically requests, getrandom() should
> never fail, but nonetheless add code to make it retry on interrupt,
> and fall back to the built-in PRNG only if it has to.
> 
> FreeBSD and OpenBSD have rewritten arc4random() to use ChaCha20, which
> should provide more than sufficient randomness.  The call has no
> return value and always succeeds, so there is no error handling
> written for it.
> 
> Many thanks to Werner Koch, Greg KH, and Alejandro Colomar for their
> feedback.
> ---
> 
> This is passing sr.ht CI, and I'm using it on my computer right now.
> 
> Note that I adjusted the length_requested type for the old PRNG code to
> be size_t and tweeked the code slightly because of that.
> 
> Feedback welcome.

Looks sane to me!

thanks,

greg k-h