Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
Bill Davidsen <davidsen(a)tmr.com> writes:
> Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
>> Is there an approved way to increase the speed at which the random pool
>> for /dev/random fills up? I'm playig with dnssec and getnerating 2k rsa
>> keys is taking up to 3 hours. I've been googling a bit and Intel x86_64
>> machines seem to have random number hardware built in (perhaps also
>> AMD???) Is there a way to funnel this into the entropy pool?
>>
> To be honest, I thought the data from the TCO random generator was funneled in
> already. That's what the "intel-rng" module does.
>
> Current kernel built with:
> CONFIG_HW_RANDOM=y
> CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_TIMERIOMEM=m
> CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_INTEL=m
> CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_AMD=m
> CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_GEODE=m
> CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_VIA=m
> CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_VIRTIO=m
Thanks. That gave me a few good strings to google for.
> If your CPU has the hardware the module should be loaded, but you can
> check with "lsmod | grep rng" to be sure, or load manually to
> test. Also virtio_rng might be useful. You might have to load by hand
> to test, then config to load by default if you want.
It turns out my (2 year old) AMD Phenom 9350e Quad-Core doesn't seem to
have that module loaded. In fact, googling for "AMD hardware random
number generator" got me a few hits of folks running an ms-windows tool
on similar processors and one of the flags checked was for the hardware
rng, which always seemed to be "not supported". I guess the modern CPU
really don't have that hardware any more. How strange (and sad!).
I haven't looked into what virtio-rng does, but it does load on anything I can
quickly test, and I doubt it will make your number any worse.
There are number of cheap USB rng units around which are supported, I just read
about one in Rich Jones' fine blog,
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/usb-hardware-random-number-generator/
which will probably get you started. His analysis is worth reading if only to
see that some people still have pride in their product.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen(a)tmr.com>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot