As I understand it, this is to gather random data. Shouldn't it use /dev/random or /dev/urandom?
Created attachment 378 [details] strace of xdm running Here's an strace of xdm, including reading pieces of /dev/mem.
Note that walking physical memory pages on architectures which have holes in physical RAM causes severe problems.
Clarification: Reading from a hole in physical memory on architectures which support holes in physical memory (e.g. ia64) causes severe problems.
xdm has code in for using /dev/random, but it's only used if the Imake configuration for your OS is set to use it. Right now, only NetBSD.cf & sun.cf set HasDevRandom. To activate it in your build, try adding this line to xc/config/cf/host.def : #define HasDevRandom YES To add it for your platform in general, look at the existing bits in NetBSD.cf and sun.cf and the bits in X11.tmpl that translate them to flags used to compile xdm.
I have enabled it by default on Linux Tue Jul 20 18:23:32 2004 Soeren Sandmann <sandmann@daimi.au.dk> * config/cf/linux.cf: Use /dev/urandom on Linux.(#761).
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