kconfig: improve seed in randconfig
authorIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:15:31 +0000 (15:15 +0100)
committerSam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:02:07 +0000 (23:02 +0100)
'make randconfig' uses glibc's rand function, and the seed of
that PRNG is set via:

srand(time(NULL));

But 'time()' only increases once every second - freezing the
randconfig result within a single second.

My Nehalem testbox does randconfig much faster than 1 second
 and i have a few scripts that do 'randconfig until condition X'
loops.

Those scripts currently waste a lot of CPU time due to randconfig
changing its seed only once per second currently.

Change the seed to be micrseconds based. (I checked the statistical
spread of the seed - the now.tv_sec*now.tv_usec multiplication
there further improves it.)

Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org>
[sam: fix for systems where usec is zero - noticed by Geert Uytterhoeven]
Signed-off-by: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
scripts/kconfig/conf.c

index 3e1057f..d190092 100644 (file)
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@
 #include <time.h>
 #include <unistd.h>
 #include <sys/stat.h>
+#include <sys/time.h>
 
 #define LKC_DIRECT_LINK
 #include "lkc.h"
@@ -464,9 +465,22 @@ int main(int ac, char **av)
                        input_mode = set_yes;
                        break;
                case 'r':
+               {
+                       struct timeval now;
+                       unsigned int seed;
+
+                       /*
+                        * Use microseconds derived seed,
+                        * compensate for systems where it may be zero
+                        */
+                       gettimeofday(&now, NULL);
+
+                       seed = (unsigned int)((now.tv_sec + 1) * (now.tv_usec + 1));
+                       srand(seed);
+
                        input_mode = set_random;
-                       srand(time(NULL));
                        break;
+               }
                case 'h':
                        printf(_("See README for usage info\n"));
                        exit(0);