urandom vs haveged

[Chris Murphy]

Performance:

dd if=/dev/zero		~56MB/s		CPU < 10%
dd if=/dev/urandom	~12MB/s		CPU 99%
haveged			~54MB/s		CPU < 25%


The dd relative values are consistent with kernels in Fedora 16. However these tests were done with 3.3.0-1. The questions are:

Is the urandom performance expected?

What is the quality of pseudo-random data produced by urandom vs haveged?

If the qualities are similar, or haveged's is better, is there anything that can be done to improve urandom's performance? It really takes quite a bit longer to prepare a disk/volume for encryption.


Chris Murphy