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dizzykey edited this page Mar 7, 2014 · 9 revisions

Welcome to the entropyservice wiki!

Hardware that has accessible h/w rng

Alix 2d3 :

and indeed any of the Alix Geode boards. Confirmed running obsd 5.[23]

dd if=/dev/random of=/tmp/randombits bs=1M count=100
104857600 bytes transferred in 6.999 secs (14981125 bytes/sec)

~15MB/s !

this entropy shows itself to pass dieharder and rng-tests very well

Alix is an enterprise grade board and processor from PCEngines. It is very stable and highly suitable for production installations often used as a gateway router, wifi AP or vpn endpoint

cost approx £50 second hand else about £130 brand new including board, case, cf card and psu

wattage less than 5W

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Raspberry Pi :

apparently it does have a h/w rng and it might be considered for home installtions

cost approx £80-100 including all psu, cables, sd cards etc

wattage approx 5W

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Serving entropy to qemu-kvm libvirt guests

step 1 : use entropyservice to supply the HOST with sufficient entropy

step 2 : virsh edit to enable virtio-rng in <devices> in your guest's xml conf

<rng model='virtio'>
  <backend model='random'>/dev/random</backend>
  <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x06' function='0x0'/>
</rng>

step 3 : stop the VM completely and now virsh start your VM, a simple reboot of the VM wont pick up the change

step 4 : in the GUEST install rng-tools

for instance in Debian : aptitude install rng-tools

edit /etc/default/rng-tools add or edit the line ....

RNGDOPTIONS="--fill-watermark=90% --feed-interval=1 --rng-timeout=0 --random-step=256"

save and

/etc/init.d/rng-tools restart

you should now see

ps aux | grep rngd root 1673 0.0 0.1 96516 376 ? SLsl Mar06 0:37 /usr/sbin/rngd -r /dev/hwrng --fill-watermark=90% --feed-interval=1 --rng-timeout=0 --random-step=256

step 4 : there is no step 4!

now enjoy more entropy in your Virtual Machine

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