[Fedora-xen] Continued entropy problems in xen kernels

Paul Wouters paul at xelerance.com
Thu Oct 5 04:36:44 UTC 2006


I was just hit by another case of "no entropy in xen kernels". I filed a
bugreport against openswan for this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=209395

Xen kernels really need to obtain better entropy. Either some entropy
gathering daemon that takes its input from the dom0 should be added
to the xenguest-install, or the xen kernel should be modified so it
can somehow obtain entropy from the dom0 through some kernel mechanism.

To see the difference:

run on dom0:

hexdump -C /dev/random

After you empty /dev/random, you'll see a new line of random every few
seconds. break hexdump, and do some entropy gathering, for example by
running the following command for 20 seconds:

"find -type f / | xargs grep SFDSFGHSFSDFGDFHGFHS"

Now boot the xen run hexdump there.

Paul




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