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My understanding is that /dev/random is truly random data gathered from
the keyboard, various interrupts, etc. It's usually not necessary to
read a lot of data from /dev/random -- typically a few bytes to seed a
random number generator. Further, the underlying device is not capable
of holding a large pool of data, so it must constantly be refreshed.<br>
<br>
/dev/urandom is a process which generates random data algorithmically,
and (likely) gets its initial seed from /dev/random.<br>
<br>
<br>
Jim Kinney wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:437d2f230812051047v334226ecw7b5ad5a165f872f5@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">/dev/random and /dev/urandom?<br>
<br>
/dev/random is very slow and on a newly installed machine `cat
/dev/random` does little. Same machine `cat /dev/urandom` fills the
screen quickly.<br>
<br>
Is there a way to "add entropy" to get /dev/random to fill quicker?<br
clear="all">
<br>
-- <br>
-- <br>
James P. Kinney III <br>
<br>
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