On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 7:22 AM, Mark H. Wood <mw...@iupui.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 01:54:57PM -0700, Kyle Hamilton wrote:
>> OpenSSL uses the operating system to get entropy. If AMD wants Linux
>> to support its on-chip random number generator, it needs to write a
>> driver that replaces /dev/random and /dev/urandom.
>
> ...or feeds into them.
>
> Sufficient but not necessary. If AMD have released spec.s in a
> manner compatible with the kernel license and development model then
> someone else could write that driver. Some would say that is the
> preferred method.
This may be "preferred" according to RMS^Wsome... but as long as the
code is written, and put under the GPLv2, Linux can use it. In fact,
if the code is written, and is released under a new-BSD-style license
(without the obnoxious advertising clause), Linux can use it, and so
can every other OS. (Even openssl would be able to integrate it for
those platforms without explicit support for kernel crypto
acceleration.)
I know that I'm not going to write code for a CPU that I don't have.
(Linus Torvalds even created Linux first in order to explore the
capabilities of the i386 chip that he'd just gotten.) If AMD has an
itch ("we want to build the value proposition for the Geode as opposed
to Intel chips") to scratch, then AMD is the entity which needs to
scratch it. It really can't wait for someone else to do it, because
there's more than enough competition already, and who wants to write
code from scratch for one platform when it's already been written and
integrated for another?
>> In addition, Intel has been playing nice and getting its code in the
>> openssl distribution, as a set of patches that were integrated not too
>> long ago. Nobody has submitted such a patch for the Geode to my
>> knowledge (I'm not god of the request tracker, but most mails sent to
>> r...@openssl.org
>> are forwarded to the -dev list; I've not seen any patches come in).
>> (i.e.: Intel is doing strategic positioning that AMD is not.)
>
> That's smart of Intel. But again, if AMD have released spec.s under
> liberal terms then maybe they think they *are* positioning their
> product, and nobody has picked up on it yet.
Come on, we're talking about AMD. The company that bought ATI. They
might have gotten the impression that there's someone, somewhere, who
wants to write code for their chip, because that was the experience
that ATI had when they released the specifications for the 3D
acceleration of their chips. (Their impression might have been that
way because there were a lot of people who'd purchased ATI graphics
cards or chips, and had their own itches to scratch -- and had
purchased ATI because nVidia refused to make their specs available,
and did everything they could to convince the Linux kernel that its
binary-only driver would not "taint" it... by including the four
characters "GPL\0" at the beginning of their "all rights reserved"
copyright statement.)
-Kyle H
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