Re: [Xen-devel] dom0 and domU /dev/urandom generating too less entropy

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/10/07 21:00, "Stephan Seitz" <s.seitz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Do you know about a workaround, or maybe the possibility for another
> (xen-specific) RNG
> besides of /dev/urandom ?

I'm surprised you see failures. By my understanding, /dev/urandom is always
supposed to return the request number of bytes, but their randomness depends
on the amount of entropy currently in the pool. Perhaps sshd explicitly
interrogates urandom to find out how much entropy it has gathered?

Anyway, the domU kernel gathers entropy from the interrupt delivery times of
the netfront and blkfront drivers. This is similar to what a native kernel
does. It's not clear how we can easily improve on that without e.g.,
plumbing through a hardware RNG to domUs.

 -- Keir



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