getting garbage faster using FreeBSD?

[Thomas Hurst]

* Bill Moran (wmoran at collaborativefusion.com) wrote:

> Are you actually using /dev/random and not /dev/urandom?
>
> /dev/random is "military grade" random data.  It will block if it
> feels that it hasn't gathered enough entropy to satisfy your request.
> It will never provide random data at any reasonable speed, but it will
> provide high-quality random data.
>
> If you need lost of random data, use /dev/urandom, which provides data
> that _may_ be predictable under some circumstances, but will provide
> it at a decent rate of speed.

This hasn't been true since FreeBSD 5 and the introduction of Yarrow;
/dev/random and /dev/urandom are one in the same:

lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     wheel           6 Jan  1  1970 /dev/urandom ->
random

-% dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
536870912 bytes transferred in 9.997684 secs (53699528 bytes/sec)

-% dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=1M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
536870912 bytes transferred in 10.036211 secs (53493386 bytes/sec)

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
    http://hur.st/