If you are wondering what the requirements are for the salt, have a look at the RFC[1]:
"The salt parameter should be a random string containing at least 64 bits of entropy. That means when generated from a function like *mcrypt_create_iv*, at least 8 bytes long. But for salts that consist of only *a-zA-Z0-9* (or are base_64 encoded), the minimum length should be at least 11 characters. It should be generated random for each password that's hashed, and stored along side the generated key."
[1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/hash_pbkdf2