Johannes, On Tuesday 03 March 2015 20:31:06 Johannes Ernst wrote: > What’s the best source of randomness for a Linux guest? > > I’ve been reading about virtio-rng [1]. Can it be made to work with > VirtualBox?
VirtualBox does not support virtio-rng but I guess it's not very difficult to add this feature. I'm more worried about support for hosts/guests different than Linux. The source for entropy in a virtual machine is in principle the same like on bare metal, for instance device interrupts and their distribution over time, several clocks and the time stamp counter. VirtualBox tries very hard (and this will be even improved in the next major release) to provide the guest sensible values when reading the time stamp counter using the RDTSC machine instruction. But I admit that the sources for entropy within a virtual machine are limited in comparison to bare metal, mainly because a guest is usually configured to have only access to virtual devices being essential for doing it's job. Frank -- Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert | Software Development Director, VirtualBox ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG | Werkstr. 24 | 71384 Weinstadt, Germany Hauptverwaltung: Riesstr. 25, D-80992 München Registergericht: Amtsgericht München, HRA 95603 Geschäftsführer: Jürgen Kunz Komplementärin: ORACLE Deutschland Verwaltung B.V. Hertogswetering 163/167, 3543 AS Utrecht, Niederlande Handelsregister der Handelskammer Midden-Niederlande, Nr. 30143697 Geschäftsführer: Alexander van der Ven, Astrid Kepper, Val Maher _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list vbox-dev@virtualbox.org https://www.virtualbox.org/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev