entropy gathering (was Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom deplete entropy so much?)

Jeff Garzik
2007-12-08T19:37:29Z

As an aside...

Speaking as the maintainer rng-tools, which is the home of the hardware
RNG entropy gathering daemon...

I wish somebody (not me) would take rngd and several other projects, and
combine them into a single actively maintained "entropy gathering" package.

IMO entropy gathering has been a long-standing need for headless network
servers (and now virtual machines).

In addition to rngd for hardware RNGs, I've been daemons out there that
gather from audio and video sources (generally open wires/channels with
nothing plugged in), thermal sources, etc. There is a lot of entropy
that could be gathered via userland, if you think creatively.

Jeff