>> Maybe on OpenBSD pg should switch srandom to srandom_deterministic?
>
> Dunno. I'm fairly annoyed by their idea that they're smarter than POSIX.
> However, for most of our uses of srandom, this behavior isn't awful;
> it's only pgbench that has an expectation that the platform random()
> can be made to behave deterministically. And TBH I think that's just
> an expectation that's going to bite us.
>
> I'd suggest that maybe we should get rid of the use of both random()
> and srandom() in pgbench, and go over to letting set_random_seed()
> fill the pg_erand48 state directly. In the integer-seed case you
> could use something equivalent to pg_srand48. (In the other cases
> probably you could do better, certainly the strong-random case could
> just fill all 6 bytes directly.) That would get us to a place where
> the behavior of --random-seed=N is not only deterministic but
> platform-independent, which seems like an improvement.
That's a point. Althought I'm not found of round48, indeed having
something platform independent for testing makes definite sense.
I'll look into it.
--
Fabien.