faster /dev/random

[Thomas Cameron]

On 08/21/2010 10:46 PM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
>
> Is there an approved way to increase the speed at which the random pool
> for /dev/random fills up?  I'm playig with dnssec and getnerating 2k rsa
> keys is taking up to 3 hours.  I've been googling a bit and Intel x86_64
> machines seem to have random number hardware built in (perhaps also
> AMD???)  Is there a way to funnel this into the entropy pool?
>
> -wolfgang

Sorry I was way too quick on the previous.

I've always heard that you can get faster random numbers by generating a 
lot of interrupts.  I usually do something like run 
/etc/cron.daily/mlocate to generate a lot of disk activity.

And, as I said earlier, depending on how random you want your numbers to 
be, you might consider using /dev/urandom, which is a pseudo-random 
number generator and is a lot faster than /dev/random.