Hi Neil, >First, regarding the rng-tools version looks rather out of date. From what
yes. As I explicitly wrote in the first message, this is about the *heavily* patched “Debian classic” version of rng-tools 2.x; the package with 5.x is called rng-tools5 currently, and updating it is tracked elsewhere¹. >I'd strongly suggest updating to the latest >version to avoid some of the problems described in the bug As stated multiple times², “updating” is actually a major loss of functionality and therefore not possible for many users, which is why rng-tools-debian contains the heavily patched old version. It’s basically a fork. (Feel free to merge those patches upstream, or, considering the drift, it’d probably be more like, reimplement the same functionality with the same options on top of the newer upstream version.) Until then, the entirety(!) of this thread is about rng-tools 2.x. >As for the question regarding starting rngd on multiple cores, I can't No, this would also apply to single cores. The question is about starting rngd multiple times, for example if there are multiple entropy sources, or rather, if the start is controlled by different causes. For example, one is started at boot and uses virtio-rng, another is started by udev when the WLAN chip containing an RNG comes online, and a third is started manually in a pipe with stunnel to retrieve entropy from a central server over the network. (Worst-case scenario, I guess.) Basically… does the Linux kernel take incoming entropy from all three instances? (The -W flag probably needs to be the same…) Does it hurt any, or does it help any? bye, //mirabilos ① https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=922677 in the package rng-tools5, which is maintained by a completely different person as well, so I can’t comment on it ② in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rng-tools/+bug/1333293 first, but also multiple times in #951799 and #919893 -- (gnutls can also be used, but if you are compiling lynx for your own use, there is no reason to consider using that package) -- Thomas E. Dickey on the Lynx mailing list, about OpenSSL
