Re: Handling of entropy during boot

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Marco" == Marco d'Itri <md@Linux.IT> writes:

    Marco> online.  Is it enough to feed the host side of virtio-rng
    Marco> with /dev/random or should everybody who has virtual machines
    Marco> also install rngd in the host?  Is rngd to be preferred to
    Marco> haveged?

I'd also like to point out that virtio-rng is only a solution for kvm.
I recently discovered that Vmware appears to have no virtual RNG
available to the guest at all.

A buster vmware guest will boot but will be unable to start sshd because
of lack of entropy for typically five minutes or so.
A lot of stuff breaks in that configuration.
virtio-rng doesn't help at all.

You can claim that Vmware is broken all you want, but a lot of people us
it, and we really should produce an operating system that  you can ssh
into when you boot a bunch of instances in a virtual environment.

--Sam