Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754716AbXLHUov (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Dec 2007 15:44:51 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1754180AbXLHUoj (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Dec 2007 15:44:39 -0500 Received: from 1wt.eu ([62.212.114.60]:2602 "EHLO 1wt.eu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753545AbXLHUoi (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Dec 2007 15:44:38 -0500 Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2007 21:42:39 +0100 From: Willy Tarreau To: Jeff Garzik Cc: Matt Mackall , Theodore Tso , Mike McGrath , Jon Masters , Alan Cox , Ray Lee , Adrian Bunk , Marc Haber , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, hmh@debian.org Subject: Re: entropy gathering (was Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom deplete entropy so much?) Message-ID: <20071208204239.GG15227@1wt.eu> References: <4755D350.1080801@redhat.com> <20071204223345.GJ19691@waste.org> <4756B50B.3060100@redhat.com> <20071205144934.GL7259@thunk.org> <1197099477.20786.149.camel@perihelion> <20071208173204.GI17037@thunk.org> <475AD585.7020908@redhat.com> <20071208174908.GJ17037@thunk.org> <20071208181525.GL19691@waste.org> <475AF241.5000809@garzik.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <475AF241.5000809@garzik.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1261 Lines: 31 On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 02:36:33PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: > > As an aside... > > Speaking as the maintainer rng-tools, which is the home of the hardware > RNG entropy gathering daemon... > > I wish somebody (not me) would take rngd and several other projects, and > combine them into a single actively maintained "entropy gathering" package. > > IMO entropy gathering has been a long-standing need for headless network > servers (and now virtual machines). > > In addition to rngd for hardware RNGs, I've been daemons out there that > gather from audio and video sources (generally open wires/channels with > nothing plugged in), thermal sources, etc. There is a lot of entropy > that could be gathered via userland, if you think creatively. I remember having installed openssh on an AIX machines years ago, and being amazed by the number of sources it collected entropy from. Simple commands such as "ifconfig -a", "netstat -i" and "du -a", "ps -ef", "w" provided a lot of entropy. Regards, Willy -- 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/