Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:51:46 +0100 From: RW <fbsd06@mlists.homeunix.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Which VIA CPUs have hardware RNG support? Message-ID: <20080710185146.37f0a625@gumby.homeunix.com.> In-Reply-To: <7956f3200807090831u1bd6bfddxf78517ae46a32b95@mail.gmail.com> References: <7956f3200807090831u1bd6bfddxf78517ae46a32b95@mail.gmail.com>
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On Wed, 9 Jul 2008 11:31:36 -0400 "Joseph Gleason" <fireduck@gmail.com> wrote: > I am trying to figure out which VIA CPUs support hardware RNG under > recent FreeBSD. I've been looking at things on 7.0-RELEASE-p2. If > there is something that else I should be looking at, please let me > know. > > Based on 'man 4 random' I see: > "The only hardware implementation currently is for the > VIA C3 Nehemiah (stepping 3 or greater) CPU. More will be added > in the future." > > Poking around in the kernel I see that indeed nehemiah and yarrow seem > to be the only random sources there. If you have a need for a lot of entropy, you can also use the kernel RC4 generator via "sysctl kern.arandom". A couple of other hardware sources are implemented as yarrow entropy sources rather than using the hardware generator directly. I think the support for AMD Geode LX, will be of this form. I suspect that this is more secure than the nehemiah support since it doesn't actually rely on on the hardware alone.
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