Is anyone else having trouble with rngd (random number generator)? It’s been eating up my CPU. I’ve allowed it 10-20 minutes to do its course but eventually kill it. I’m not sure what openSUSE uses this for, but I’m thinking of stopping the service. What else depends on it?
Never seen it before. New to me.
No issue here.
Don’t have it running …
rngd doesn’t run at all times, but it appears to be associated with the Random service, “Script to snapshot random state and reload it at boot time.” I can’t confirm this, and I don’t know what a “random state” would be. Almost sounds like it could be critical, but killing the daemon doesn’t lead to other problems that I can tell.
rngd is called by ‘/etc/init.d/rng-tools.’
# Short-Description: Support for hardware Random Number Generators (RNGs)
# Description: Loads RNG-modules specific to the hardware (if not automatically
# loaded by udev accoding to the PCI id) and starts the userspace
# daemon that passes the RNG data from /dev/hwrng to /dev/random
Restarting this in the terminal in the terminal, rngd runs for a few seconds (90-100% CPU), then is killed by rng-tools. On a reboot, rng-tools doesn’t kill rngd. rngd continues indefinitely until I kill it manually.
It may be a hardware issue, but I didn’t run into this before 11.3. lsmod doesn’t list a hardware rng module. It’s an old computer, I wonder if there’s just not a driver for this in 11.3?
I don’t have rng-tools installed on 11.2 but it exists in the repo. Did you update your system from 11.2? Perhaps this is an update bug and rng-tools needs to have any stray config files removed and then reinstalled? Or just removed if you don’t need it. You’d have to use ipsec or something like that to need rng-tools.
I did a clean install. Maybe I should be asking why this was added now. As near as I can tell my system doesn’t even support it.
No mention of rng-tools on the wiki. I removed it. There were no dependencies, and nothing appears to be broken.
On 2010-08-17 23:06, chief sealth wrote:
>
> rngd doesn’t run at all times, but it appears to be associated with the
> Random service, “Script to snapshot random state and reload it at boot
> time.” I can’t confirm this, and I don’t know what a “random state”
> would be. Almost sounds like it could be critical, but killing the
> daemon doesn’t lead to other problems that I can tell.
There are things in the system that need random data, for example cryptographic applications, and
generating this is slow and cpu intensive. This service is new in 11.3 (or was it in factory?), and
the little I know of it is that it stores somehow some random data so that other services can use it
when they need.
Have a look at “man 4 random”; notice the difference between urandom and random: one of the two has
to wait for entropy. The rngd daemon should minimize this delay, I guess.
I don’t think it is critical, for most people. Ask in the factory mail list.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))
Same here in 11.3
It’s in the repo, but not installed.
ken, caf, do either of you have the base development and C/C++ packages installed? This is driving me crazy. I’m really curious why I’m the only one who had the tools installed.
Yes, I have dev packages installed, but I’m still on 11.2.
You can use
rpm -q --whatrequires rng-tools
to see which package dragged it in. If none, maybe you installed it by accident.