On Wednesday 21 September 2011 16:50:16 Hannu Nyman wrote:
> After removal of the network drivers as an entropy source in Linux kernels
> a while ago, some routers e.g. in ar71xx family experience lack of
> hardware entropy for /dev/random. The device /dev/random can hang due to
> that. There are pseudo random numbers available in /dev/urandom, but they
> do not end up in /dev/random.
>
> E.g. tickets #9631 and #9999 are related to this problematics.
>
> One tool for adding entropy data from an arbitrary source to the kernel
> entropy pool is rngd daemon included in the rng-tools package from
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkernel/
> Manual page: http://linux.die.net/man/8/rngd
>
> The tool can be used to add entropy to the kernel's entropy pool either
> from some genuine hardware-based entropy source, or as a quick&dirty patch
> also from /dev/urandom. Using urandom isn't a perfect solution, but it
> will satisfy those applications looking for input from /dev/random.
>
> As far as I found out, nobody has complied the rngd daemon package for
> Openwrt, so far.
> I made a try out of it, and succeeded both for Backfire and trunk.
>
> I defined a package that downloads the sources from SF. (This is my first
> package definition, so the dependencies and conventions might not be quite
> correct, but the package seems to compile and work both in Backfire and
> trunk.)
>
> Hopefully somebody can figure out a way to connect some real entropy source
> in ar71xxx devices through this daemon. The package could be used with real
> hardware entropy sources (like the Entropy key), if they provide a suitable
> interface for the daemon to the entropy data from them.
>
> Signed-off-by: Hannu Nyman <hannu.ny...@iki.fi>
Applied in r28332, thanks!
--
Florian
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