Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 19 May 2014 17:23:20 -0400 | From | Jörn Engel <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] random: mix all saved registers into entropy pool |
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On Mon, 19 May 2014 17:17:19 -0400, Jörn Engel wrote: > > Experimentation show this to be an excellent entropy source. Doing 1000 > boottests with kvm and dumping a hash of the registers for the first > 1024 interrupts each, >40% of all hashes were unique and >80% of all > hashes occurred less than once 1% of the time.
And since I previously claimed the opposite, the negative result was caused by a kvm oddity. When starting kvm in the background, it will run just fine. But when starting kvm with "-nographic" in the background, the process gets stopped. No output is generated and the output file is not even truncated before kvm is stopped. Therefore every single run will have identical kernel output - that of the previous run.
With that embarrassment out of the way, I find this approach hugely valuable. Even if you disagree with some detail of this patch, we should definitely merge something roughly related.
Jörn
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