frandom: Even faster kernel randomness (tummy.com, ltd. Journal Entry)
tummy.com: we do linux

Wednesday December 09, 2009 at 03:57
Subject: frandom: Even faster kernel randomness
Keywords: Linux, Random
Posted by: Sean Reifschneider

I'm running some stress-testing of ZFS-FUSE, in particular the new "dedup" version. It seems to be working fine, but as part of my stress testing I'm writing a bunch of random data. /dev/random and /dev/urandom are very good sources of randomness, but they sure use a lot of CPU time.

After a (very) brief search I found the frandom driver. A few minutes later I had it built and installed in my Karmic test system. My stress test program has gone down from using 90% CPU time to 20% (with ZFS using the remaining 180% :-).
(Post Reply)