Lua Randomness Library

[zorg]

The Linux kernel has one, but its throughput is slow. I made a test in which I got just under 600 MB of random numbers during about 5 years.

If anyone's curious, that would be about 0.95 Bytes per second.

Edit: apparently i can't divide 300 by 5 correctly, welp

[grump]

The Linux kernel has one, but its throughput is slow. I made a test in which I got just under 600 MB of random numbers during about 5 years.

If anyone's curious, that would be about 0.95 Bytes per second.

Nah, it's ~3.8 bytes per second.

Much slower than I expected.

[pgimeno]

That's an average; it depends on the activity of the events that the kernel gathers entropy from. I've just measured the time it took to read a 1K block, three times in different conditions. With a download going on during the measurement, the throughput was about 12.6 B/s. By continuously moving my mouse and typing in the keyboard, I got about 4.5 B/s. By idling, but with some background network activity from IRC pings and whatnot, it was a bit under 0.35 B/s, or about 20 B/min.

Edit: I've installed the rng-tools5 package, which provides a rngd daemon that feeds the kernel's entropy pool, based on my CPU's RDRAND instruction (my CPU doesn't support RDSEED, which is the best one). Generation of 1KB is now in the ms range, if not faster (I can no longer measure it reliably).