Re: Support getrandom() for pg_strong_random() source

Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>

From: Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>
To: Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com>
Cc: Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>, Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker <ilmari@ilmari.org>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com>
Date: 2025-10-10T00:11:26Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Thu, Oct 9, 2025 at 4:53 PM Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does it mean that we introduce something like pg_fast_random() and
> packagers can select it as the random number generation function
> instead of pg_strong_random()? Or can packagers select the function
> used in pg_strong_random()?

The latter -- packagers should be able to select the implementation of
pg_strong_random(). I think pg_fast_random() is likely to be a bad
abstraction if we don't have more use cases to guide it.

> All of these sound reasonable to me. I think we can handle this as two
> separate discussions: one for the UUID implementation changes, and
> another for the pg_strong_random() modifications (which would cover
> both the runtime switching for superusers and the compile-time
> alternatives for packagers).

Sounds good to me. (Which would you like this thread to be?)

--Jacob