= Features/Virtio RNG = https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Virtio_RNG Feature owner(s): Cole Robinson <crobinso@xxxxxxxxxx>, Amit Shah <amit.shah@xxxxxxxxxx> Provide a paravirtual random number generator to virtual machines, to prevent entropy starvation in guests. == Detailed description == The linux kernel collects entropy from various non-deterministic hardware events, like mouse and keyboard input, and network traffic. This entropy is then exposed through /dev/random, commonly used by cryptographic applications that need true randomness to maintain security. However if more entropy is being consumed than is being produced, we have entropy starvation: reading from /dev/random will block, which can cause a denial of service. A common example here is use of /dev/random by SSL in various services. VirtIO RNG (random number generator) is a paravirtualized device that is exposed as a hardware RNG device to the guest. Virtio RNG just appears as a regular hardware RNG to the guest, which the kernel reads from to fill its entropy pool. This effectively allows a host to inject entropy into a guest via several means: The default mode uses the host's /dev/random, but a physical HW RNG device or EGD (Entropy Gathering Daemon) source can also be used. _______________________________________________ devel-announce mailing list devel-announce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
