[systemd-devel] Why we need to read/save random seed?

[Dax Kelson]

On Jun 14, 2015 10:11 AM, "Cristian Rodríguez" <
cristian.rodriguez at opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 1:43 PM, Greg KH <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org>
wrote:
> > On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 12:49:55PM -0300, Cristian Rodríguez wrote:
>
>
> Las time I checked , it required this userspace help even when the
> machine has rdrand/rdseed or when a virtual machine is fed from the
> host using the virtio-rng driver.. (may take up to 60 seconds to
> report
> random: nonblocking pool is initialized) Any other possible solution
> that I imagined involves either blocking and/or changes in the
> behaviour visible to userspace and that is probably unacceptable
> .

I added the following text to Wikipedia's /dev/random page.

"With Linux kernel 3.16 and newer, the kernel itself mixes data from hardware
random number generators
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator>
into/dev/random on
a sliding scale based on the definable entropy estimation quality of the
HWRNG. This means that no userspace daemon, such as rngd from rng-toolsis
needed to do that job. With Linux kernel 3.17+, the VirtIO RNG was modified
to have a default quality defined above 0, and as such, is currently the
only HWRNG mixed into /dev/random by default."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/attachments/20150614/9ced7629/attachment.html>