Re: /dev/random in 2.4.6

Steve Hill (steve@navaho.co.uk)
Wed, 15 Aug 2001 16:27:04 +0100 (BST)


On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Richard B. Johnson wrote:

> Same problem on 2.4.1. The first 512 bytes comes right away if
> /dev/random hasn't been accessed since boot, then the rest trickles
> a few words per second.

Hmm... Well, ATM I've kludged a fix by using /dev/urandom instead, but
it's not ideal because it's being used to generate cryptographic keys, and
urandom isn't cryptographically secure.

Are you seeing the problem on a normal machine? (I assumed I was seeing it
because I'm using Cobalt hardware that's not going to get much entropy
data due to the lack of keyboard, etc)... although when I'm generating
this data I'm using a root NFS filesystem, so there should be plenty of
network interrupts happening,which should generate some entropy...

I might have a look into increasing the size of the entropy pool so
there's more data to access at once...

-- 

- Steve Hill System Administrator Email: steve@navaho.co.uk Navaho Technologies Ltd. Tel: +44-870-7034015

... Alcohol and calculus don't mix - Don't drink and derive! ...

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/