Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 16 May 2008 11:40:12 -0700 | From | "Kok, Auke" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] drivers/net: remove network drivers' last few uses of IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM |
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Alan Cox wrote: >> So what is one to do if a few applications want to read from /dev/random >> but you have no excellent source of entropy on the system? Wait >> forever? > > Yes. > > If they don't need that level of security they can use /dev/urandom. > Piping network randomness into /dev/urandom is probably quite sensible > but not into /dev/random.
I remember Jesse telling that he had this very same experience while installing a RH box on a headless system with a serial console - a box prompted the user to rattle a keyboard in order for the ssh key generation to continue :)
you absolutely don't want to use urandom for that I assume, but if the system just sits dead waiting for randomness, and you can't see the popup asking for some entropy, you're pretty much screwed :)
Auke
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