[Haskell-cafe] How can I avoid buffered reads?

[Leon Smith]

I have some code that reads (infrequently) small amounts of data from
/dev/urandom,  and because this is pretty infrequent,  I simply open the
handle and close it every time I need some random bytes.

The problem is that I recently discovered that,  thanks to buffering within
GHC,   I was actually reading 8096 bytes when I only need 16 bytes,  and
thus wasting entropy.   Moreover  calling hSetBuffering  handle NoBuffering
did not change this behavior.

I'm not sure if this behavior is a bug or a feature,  but in any case it's
unacceptable for dealing with /dev/urandom.   Probably the simplest way to
fix this is to write a little C helper function that will read from
/dev/urandom for me,  so that I have precise control over the system calls
involved.     But I'm curious if GHC can manage this use case correctly;
I've just started digging into the GHC.IO code myself.

Best,
Leon

{-# LANGUAGE BangPatterns, ViewPatterns #-}
import           Control.Applicativeimport           Data.Bitsimport
        Data.Word(Word64)import qualified Data.ByteString as Simport
qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as Limport
Data.ByteString.Internal (c2w)import qualified System.IO        as
IOimport qualified Data.Binary.Get        as Get
showHex :: Word64 -> S.ByteStringshowHex n = s
  where
    (!s,_) = S.unfoldrN 16 f n

    f n = Just (char (n `shiftR` 60), n `shiftL` 4)

    char (fromIntegral -> i)
      | i < 10    = (c2w '0' -  0) + i
      | otherwise = (c2w 'a' - 10) + i
twoRandomWord64s :: IO (Word64,Word64)twoRandomWord64s =
IO.withBinaryFile "/dev/urandom" IO.ReadMode $ \handle -> do
   IO.hSetBuffering handle IO.NoBuffering
   Get.runGet ((,) <$> Get.getWord64host <*> Get.getWord64host) <$>
L.hGet handle 16
main = do
   (x,y) <- twoRandomWord64s
   S.hPutStrLn IO.stdout (S.append (showHex x) (showHex y))

{- Relevant part of strace:

open("/dev/urandom", O_RDONLY|O_NOCTTY|O_NONBLOCK) = 3
fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0666, st_rdev=makedev(1, 9), ...}) = 0
ioctl(3, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0x7ffff367e528) = -1 EINVAL
(Invalid argument)
ioctl(3, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0x7ffff367e528) = -1 EINVAL
(Invalid argument)
read(3, "N\304\4\367/\26c\"\3218\237f\214yKg~i\310\r\262\"\224H\340y\n\376V?\265\344"...,
8096) = 8096
close(3)                                = 0

-}
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