Colm Buckley: "I feel that there is no consistent way to signal to higher-level applications that the random data has sub-standard entropy; but that this at least preserves the expected semantics, and doesn't block on startup in the event of an uninitialized entropy pool."

I chose to document the behaviour of os.urandom().


Stefan Krah (msg267539): "If admins wish, they can also integrate such checks into the system startup sequence (e.g. runlevel 3 is only reached if randomness is actually available)."

Maybe need something like time.get_clock_info(), sys.float_info and sys.thread_info for os.urandom(): a string describing the implementation of os.urandom(). It would allow the developer to decide what to do when getrandom() is not used.

Reminder: getrandom() feature is specific to Linux. I understand that all other operating systems don't warn if the urandom entropy pool is not initialized yet!