Collecting entropy from device_attach() times.

[Pawel Jakub Dawidek]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 12:58:37PM +0200, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> > Note that this fake data is the hardest to gather entropy from, as it
> > doesn't interact with any external hardware. I'm all for testing it on
> > real hardware and I expect to be able to gather even more entropy from
> > it (so discarding less than top 7 bits). The problem with making
> > observations during boot takes much, much longer, so it will limit the
> > number os samples significantly, and as you know the more samples the
> > better.
> 
> I have a handful of SFF machines which support PXE.  I can easily set up
> an NFS root where /etc/rc just remounts / rw, dumps the data and
> reboots.  With a sub-minute cycle time, I can get a couple of hundred
> thousand samples per machine over the weekend.

That would be great.

> (I don't even need PXE - they'll probably boot faster from USB sticks or
> disks)

And probably more reliable. My netbooted test machines occasionally
don't boot and you don't want to find out in the morning that the whole
process stopped at 1AM:)

-- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheelsystems.com
FreeBSD committer                         http://www.FreeBSD.org
Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!                     http://tupytaj.pl
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