Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 17:03:28 +0000 From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@clara.net> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> Cc: Volker <volker@vwsoft.com>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> Subject: Re: getting garbage faster using FreeBSD? Message-ID: <20070220170328.GA51253@voi.aagh.net> In-Reply-To: <20070220091238.c04cfceb.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> References: <45D9FD35.6040702@vwsoft.com> <20070219195143.GA42379@xor.obsecurity.org> <45DA121E.1040803@vwsoft.com> <20070220091238.c04cfceb.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com>
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* Bill Moran (wmoran@collaborativefusion.com) wrote:
> Are you actually using /dev/random and not /dev/urandom?
>
> /dev/random is "military grade" random data. It will block if it
> feels that it hasn't gathered enough entropy to satisfy your request.
> It will never provide random data at any reasonable speed, but it will
> provide high-quality random data.
>
> If you need lost of random data, use /dev/urandom, which provides data
> that _may_ be predictable under some circumstances, but will provide
> it at a decent rate of speed.
This hasn't been true since FreeBSD 5 and the introduction of Yarrow;
/dev/random and /dev/urandom are one in the same:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 6 Jan 1 1970 /dev/urandom ->
random
-% dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
536870912 bytes transferred in 9.997684 secs (53699528 bytes/sec)
-% dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=1M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
536870912 bytes transferred in 10.036211 secs (53493386 bytes/sec)
--
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
http://hur.st/
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