Actually still confused

Posted Apr 30, 2015 18:43 UTC (Thu) by HIGHGuY (subscriber, #62277)
In reply to: Actually still confused by tpo
Parent article: Random numbers from CPU execution time jitter

> ... will block and wait to gather more entropy even after the machine has been
> running for months and thus has seen "infinite" amounts of randomness.

Now in this case you would assume that the entropy pool is a piece of memory with random content that grows as it gathers more entropy. This would be impractical as it would deplete memory for the "infinite" amount of randomness.

Actually, you should think of it as a fixed size memory buffer where feeding data into it is a transformation function ent_new = f(ent_old, new_data).