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It's a real problem, Thomas, particularly in headless VMs cloned from a freshly-installed image. On these machines, reading /dev/random at boot time can hang i

It's a real problem, Thomas, particularly in headless VMs cloned from a freshly-installed image. On these machines, reading /dev/random at boot time can hang indefinitely. Your "1 line in an rc script" will make the OS appear to be broken. It's possible the problem can be ameliorated by a combination of approaches. Educating sysadmins is clearly important. I can imagine a userspace process monitoring /dev/random at boot time and screaming if someone tries to read from it and it blocks. (Though on a headless VM, "screaming" in such a way as to reliably be heard may be nontrivial.) The point is, work needs to be done here, by a variety of people, including the distro publishers. Getting that to happen is going to take some advocacy.

voltagex_ 13y ago
As a rather contrived example (VirtualBox, without keyboard input: [voltagex@arch ~]$ cat /dev/random | dd of=/dev/null ^C0+0 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 8.91021 s, 0.0 kB/s [voltagex@fedora ~]$ cat /dev/random | dd of=/dev/null ^C0+1 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 8.09669 s, 0.0 kB/s voltagex@saucy:~$ cat /dev/random | dd of=/dev/null ^C0+1 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 8.31898 s, 0.0 kB/s And then after installing haveged, the following: voltagex@saucy:~$ sudo service haveged start voltagex@saucy:~$ cat /dev/random | dd of=/dev/null ^C0+81630 records in 20406+0 records out 10447872 bytes (10 MB) copied, 2.92772 s, 3.6 MB/s Is installing haveged the right thing to do here? Of course if I'm completely misunderstanding what you're saying, please correct me but yes this seems to be pretty bad.