[openssl-dev] Improving OpenSSL default RNG

[Salz, Rich]

> Yeah, I guess both pthread and Windows implementations can both be called
> "native".

Yes, that's the intent.
 
> FWIW I did a quick research and NW, OS/2 and VMS all seem to support
> pthreads (but I don't know anything about those platforms, so I may be
> wrong).

That would be good.

> Incidentally a big user of the lock and thread-id API is mem_dbg.c, and
> looking at the code in it I was wondering whether we really need it,

Take a look at: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/450 

> FWIW the ASYNC pull request [0] already uses thread-local storage, but
> instead of using the pthread API (which is probably more portable) it uses
> the __thread syntax.

That should probably be changed.
 
> The ERR_STATE thing could also be simplified a lot by using thread-local
> storage (and the fallback thread-local support can be implemented using
> THREADID as it's currently done in ERR_STATE itself, but all the complexity
> would be moved to its own file, leaving err.c cleaner).

Yes, that should be changed too.

In case it's not clear, I've changed my thoughts.  Thread-local storage is more important and useful (thanks Kaduk and Ghedini!) than pthread-once kinds of things. I'd like to see a single API that initializes *everything* (or maybe takes a flag-bits) and a peer routine that takes down everything.  It would handle fork() and reset the RNG, and so on.