.\" Copyright (C) 2014, Theodore Ts'o .\" Copyright (C) 2014,2015 Heinrich Schuchardt .\" Copyright (C) 2015, Michael Kerrisk .\" .\" %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM) .\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this .\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are .\" preserved on all copies. .\" .\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of .\" this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that .\" the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of .\" a permission notice identical to this one. .\" .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume. .\" no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting. .\" from the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may. .\" not have taken the same level of care in the production of this. .\" manual, which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working. .\" professionally. .\" .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. .\" %%%LICENSE_END .\" .TH GETRANDOM 2 2017-09-15 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual" .SH NAME getrandom \- obtain a series of random bytes .SH SYNOPSIS .B #include .PP .BI "ssize_t getrandom(void *"buf ", size_t " buflen ", unsigned int " flags ); .SH DESCRIPTION The .BR getrandom () system call fills the buffer pointed to by .I buf with up to .I buflen random bytes. These bytes can be used to seed user-space random number generators or for cryptographic purposes. .PP By default, .BR getrandom () draws entropy from the .I urandom source (i.e., the same source as the .IR /dev/urandom device). This behavior can be changed via the .I flags argument. .PP If the .I urandom source has been initialized, reads of up to 256 bytes will always return as many bytes as requested and will not be interrupted by signals. No such guarantees apply for larger buffer sizes. For example, if the call is interrupted by a signal handler, it may return a partially filled buffer, or fail with the error .BR EINTR . .PP If the .I urandom source has not yet been initialized, then .BR getrandom () will block, unless .B GRND_NONBLOCK is specified in .IR flags . .PP The .I flags argument is a bit mask that can contain zero or more of the following values ORed together: .TP .B GRND_RANDOM If this bit is set, then random bytes are drawn from the .I random source (i.e., the same source as the .IR /dev/random device) instead of the .I urandom source. The .I random source is limited based on the entropy that can be obtained from environmental noise. If the number of available bytes in the .I random source is less than requested in .IR buflen , the call returns just the available random bytes. If no random bytes are available, the behavior depends on the presence of .B GRND_NONBLOCK in the .I flags argument. .TP .B GRND_NONBLOCK By default, when reading from the .IR random source, .BR getrandom () blocks if no random bytes are available, and when reading from the .IR urandom source, it blocks if the entropy pool has not yet been initialized. If the .B GRND_NONBLOCK flag is set, then .BR getrandom () does not block in these cases, but instead immediately returns \-1 with .I errno set to .BR EAGAIN . .SH RETURN VALUE On success, .BR getrandom () returns the number of bytes that were copied to the buffer .IR buf . This may be less than the number of bytes requested via .I buflen if either .BR GRND_RANDOM was specified in .IR flags and insufficient entropy was present in the .IR random source or the system call was interrupted by a signal. .PP On error, \-1 is returned, and .I errno is set appropriately. .SH ERRORS .TP .B EAGAIN The requested entropy was not available, and .BR getrandom () would have blocked if the .B GRND_NONBLOCK flag was not set. .TP .B EFAULT The address referred to by .I buf is outside the accessible address space. .TP .B EINTR The call was interrupted by a signal handler; see the description of how interrupted .BR read (2) calls on "slow" devices are handled with and without the .B SA_RESTART flag in the .BR signal (7) man page. .TP .B EINVAL An invalid flag was specified in .IR flags . .TP .B ENOSYS The glibc wrapper function for .BR getrandom () determined that the underlying kernel does not implement this system call. .SH VERSIONS .BR getrandom () was introduced in version 3.17 of the Linux kernel. Support was added to glibc in version 2.25. .SH CONFORMING TO This system call is Linux-specific. .SH NOTES For an overview and comparison of the various interfaces that can be used to obtain randomness, see .BR random (7). .PP Unlike .IR /dev/random and .IR /dev/urandom , .BR getrandom () does not involve the use of pathnames or file descriptors. Thus, .BR getrandom () can be useful in cases where .BR chroot (2) makes .I /dev pathnames invisible, and where an application (e.g., a daemon during start-up) closes a file descriptor for one of these files that was opened by a library. .\" .SS Maximum number of bytes returned As of Linux 3.19 the following limits apply: .IP * 3 When reading from the .IR urandom source, a maximum of 33554431 bytes is returned by a single call to .BR getrandom () on systems where .I int has a size of 32 bits. .IP * When reading from the .IR random source, a maximum of 512 bytes is returned. .SS Interruption by a signal handler When reading from the .I urandom source .RB ( GRND_RANDOM is not set), .BR getrandom () will block until the entropy pool has been initialized (unless the .BR GRND_NONBLOCK flag was specified). If a request is made to read a large number of bytes (more than 256), .BR getrandom () will block until those bytes have been generated and transferred from kernel memory to .IR buf . When reading from the .I random source .RB ( GRND_RANDOM is set), .BR getrandom () will block until some random bytes become available (unless the .BR GRND_NONBLOCK flag was specified). .PP The behavior when a call to .BR getrandom () that is blocked while reading from the .I urandom source is interrupted by a signal handler depends on the initialization state of the entropy buffer and on the request size, .IR buflen . If the entropy is not yet initialized, then the call fails with the .B EINTR error. If the entropy pool has been initialized and the request size is large .RI ( buflen "\ >\ 256)," the call either succeeds, returning a partially filled buffer, or fails with the error .BR EINTR . If the entropy pool has been initialized and the request size is small .RI ( buflen "\ <=\ 256)," then .BR getrandom () will not fail with .BR EINTR . Instead, it will return all of the bytes that have been requested. .PP When reading from the .IR random source, blocking requests of any size can be interrupted by a signal handler (the call fails with the error .BR EINTR ). .PP Using .BR getrandom () to read small buffers (<=\ 256 bytes) from the .I urandom source is the preferred mode of usage. .PP The special treatment of small values of .I buflen was designed for compatibility with OpenBSD's .BR getentropy (3), which is nowadays supported by glibc. .PP The user of .BR getrandom () .I must always check the return value, to determine whether either an error occurred or fewer bytes than requested were returned. In the case where .B GRND_RANDOM is not specified and .I buflen is less than or equal to 256, a return of fewer bytes than requested should never happen, but the careful programmer will check for this anyway! .SH BUGS As of Linux 3.19, the following bug exists: .\" FIXME patch proposed https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/11/29/16 .IP * 3 Depending on CPU load, .BR getrandom () does not react to interrupts before reading all bytes requested. .SH SEE ALSO .BR getentropy (3), .BR random (4), .BR urandom (4), .BR random (7), .BR signal (7) .SH COLOPHON This page is part of release 5.10 of the Linux .I man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at \%https://www.kernel.org/doc/man\-pages/.