1.5 KiB
libent is a cross-platform wrapper around getentropy(2). It exports
one symbol, ent_getentropy. If getentropy is available, then it's
just a shim around that. Otherwise, it uses getrandom(2) (available
since kernel 3.17) on Linux, or /dev/urandom on other *nix.
Building
It uses meson. meson ./build && ninja -C build should do the trick.
Build options
It has one option, ent_compat, which tells it to be conservative. On
Linux, this means using getrandom directly; on other *nix, it means
reading from /dev/urandom. This may make sense if you want your
binaries to run on older versions of the same OS. If your program is
mostly built from source, don't bother.
Why?
getentropy is the wave of the future. It's the correct API for
generating small amounts of entropy to create cryptographic keys or seed
PRNGs. It's good and reasonable and true, it's on Linux, *BSD, and OS
X, and it only took us fifty years of UNIX to get here.
Sadly, it only just arrived, so nobody has it yet. It didn't land in Linux until glibc 2.25, which seems to only have made it into Debian 10.
Once getentropy is everywhere you care about, you can just do a
s/ent_//g on all the call sites and discard this shim.
This project began because Urbit's entropy-generation function was bothering me. Then it got out of hand.