Arch Linux

Jindur

Member

Registered: 2011-09-29

Posts: 184

/dev/urandom on multi-core systems

I noticed that reading from /dev/urandom won't utilize more than one core, resulting in huge extra time required and wasted CPU potential if you need masses of random data.

Then I saw "urandompar", which makes use of multiple cores,
http://bues.ch/gitweb?p=urandompar.git;a=summary

Anyone know if this is safe? Maybe it could be added to Arch by default to support modern multi-core systems?

mich41

Member

Registered: 2012-06-22

Posts: 796

Re: /dev/urandom on multi-core systems

/dev/urandom generates pseudorandom data. If you really need huge amounts of pseudorandom numbers in some userspace application you can use the rand() function from C stdlib or some specialized PRNG library which will likely be faster and/or better than /dev/urandom.

Last edited by mich41 (2013-04-06 11:17:37)

Jindur

Member

Registered: 2011-09-29

Posts: 184

Re: /dev/urandom on multi-core systems

/dev/urandom generates pseudorandom data. If you really need huge amounts of pseudorandom numbers in some userspace application you can use the rand() function from C stdlib or some specialized PRNG library which will likely be faster and/or better than /dev/urandom.

I'm not writing a C program, but thanks for the suggestion.

Last edited by Jindur (2013-04-06 11:47:54)