Re: Which VIA CPUs have hardware RNG support?
On Wed, 9 Jul 2008 11:31:36 -0400 Joseph Gleason [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am trying to figure out which VIA CPUs support hardware RNG under recent FreeBSD. I've been looking at things on 7.0-RELEASE-p2. If there is something that else I should be looking at, please let me know. Based on 'man 4 random' I see: The only hardware implementation currently is for the VIA C3 Nehemiah (stepping 3 or greater) CPU. More will be added in the future. Poking around in the kernel I see that indeed nehemiah and yarrow seem to be the only random sources there. If you have a need for a lot of entropy, you can also use the kernel RC4 generator via sysctl kern.arandom. A couple of other hardware sources are implemented as yarrow entropy sources rather than using the hardware generator directly. I think the support for AMD Geode LX, will be of this form. I suspect that this is more secure than the nehemiah support since it doesn't actually rely on on the hardware alone. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Which VIA CPUs have hardware RNG support?
I am trying to figure out which VIA CPUs support hardware RNG under recent FreeBSD. I've been looking at things on 7.0-RELEASE-p2. If there is something that else I should be looking at, please let me know. Based on 'man 4 random' I see: The only hardware implementation currently is for the VIA C3 Nehemiah (stepping 3 or greater) CPU. More will be added in the future. Poking around in the kernel I see that indeed nehemiah and yarrow seem to be the only random sources there. From 'usr/src/sys/i386/i386/initcpu.c': SYSCTL_UINT(_hw, OID_AUTO, via_feature_rng, CTLFLAG_RD, via_feature_rng, 0, VIA C3/C7 RNG feature available in CPU); Based on all this and some reading on wikipedia, my best guess is that C3 Nehemiah and later and all C7 support the hardware RNG. Can anyone confirm this? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Which VIA CPUs have hardware RNG support?
Joseph Gleason wrote: I am trying to figure out which VIA CPUs support hardware RNG under recent FreeBSD. I've been looking at things on 7.0-RELEASE-p2. If there is something that else I should be looking at, please let me know. Based on 'man 4 random' I see: The only hardware implementation currently is for the VIA C3 Nehemiah (stepping 3 or greater) CPU. More will be added in the future. Poking around in the kernel I see that indeed nehemiah and yarrow seem to be the only random sources there. From 'usr/src/sys/i386/i386/initcpu.c': SYSCTL_UINT(_hw, OID_AUTO, via_feature_rng, CTLFLAG_RD, via_feature_rng, 0, VIA C3/C7 RNG feature available in CPU); Based on all this and some reading on wikipedia, my best guess is that C3 Nehemiah and later and all C7 support the hardware RNG. Can anyone confirm this? If you don't get any answers here, try freebsd-hardware@ mailing list. AFAIK (I don't have the hardware), the source is correct and C7 is also supported. I'd be glad to hear if anyone confirms it. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
