On Wed, 1 Jul 2015, Aurelien Jarno wrote: > Secondly, I don't think calling random() is the correct thing to do. > It's an expensive function that is not thread safe. Quoting the > specification: > > "Within the required constraints of the upper and lower bounds, the > manner in which the processor selects values for the Random register > is implementation-dependent." > > So it's fine if we use a PRNG like the current code, but I agree we > might want to improve it if it has some issues. We want to keep its > value reproducible though so that the icount mode works as expected.
Implementations often implement CP0.Random as a free-running counter that decrements between the bounds set as each instruction executes. Maciej
