Linux: Really using hardware random number generators.
Posted by coldtobi | 21 Oct, 2010, 23:16A HW Random Number generator (HW RNG) helps programms a lot which needs some good entrophy, something especially on server systems is rare. Syntoms are slow key generation (ssl, ssh ... ) and poor performance when reading from /dev/random.
However, soley having a HW RNG won't improve much -- this is what I learned today: I have a hifn 7955 based crypto accelerator in my NAS, but still poor /dev/random read rates.
By coincident I learned that I looked at the wrong device -- the randoms by the hardware are available through /dev/hwrng. But how does other programms know that they should use this device instead of /dev/random?
