[Openswan dev] Support for hardware random number generators

[Vrabete, Brad]

Hi Paul,

That's exactly what I'm running now  but I'm concerned about performance:
rngd is running in the user space and all these user space to kernel (and
back) transfers are using processor time.  I was trying to find a way to use
a proper HW RNG (no streams of 0, FIPS compliant) without having to use
rngd. I know OCF adds that but the OCF function does not get called on a
system with a HD, due to the way Linux's entropy pool is filled (on every
disk access and/or interrupt). Any suggestions? 

Are you using get_random_bytes in Openswan?  

Thanks,

Brad

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Paul Wouters [mailto:paul at xelerance.com] 
>Sent: 19 November 2008 16:35
>To: Vrabete, Brad
>Cc: dev at openswan.org
>Subject: Re: [Openswan dev] Support for hardware random number 
>generators
>
>On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, Vrabete, Brad wrote:
>
>> I have noticed the support for /dev/hw_random has been 
>dropped in the 
>> last versions. What was the reason? Low quality of existing HW RNG?
>
>/dev/hw_random is not meant to be used directly. You must run 
>rngd which reads /dev/hw_random, runs FIPS 140-2 tests and 
>adds to /dev/random. So all applications should only use 
>/dev/random itself.
>
>And yes, on certain intel/amd setups we got streams of zero's 
>out of /dev/hw_random.
>
>Paul
>
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