In short: Linux uses a diverse random system, with an internal pool that is not exposed and the ones which are fed by that one which actually serve user requests. One lengthy examination has been produced by the German BSI: [1] The problem occurred to me once AlpineLinux switched from kernel 4.14 to 4.19: i had hanging boots of half an hour and such on the server VM, as the RNG would not unlock; even on a CoreDuo laptop i saw this: [ 15.706636] random: dnsmasq: uninitialized urandom read (128 bytes read) [ 183.806112] random: crng init done But likely only because i hit a key... I looked around and saw other people with the same problem using the haveged daemon, which is kind of strange as it can generate thousands of bits of hard randomness in a second.Anyway, shortly before Christmas on the LUGA (Linux User Austria) ML that came up again via a Debian user, and that made me write an entropy saver. Because, the thing is, that "writing data to urandom" does no(t) (longer) do anything to /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail, but that is the value which control locking state of the RNG. As far as i know there is no way to make that happen via the shell. Modern CPUs may offer things, and it may be that on some CPUs Linux offers random.trust_cpu, yet i have no system where that is true. My 8th generation i5 has RDRAND and RDSEED, but still the entropy-saver as attached helps here. What it does is just the same as is done to urandom seed, so i have in /etc/rc # Load random seed /bin/cat /var/lib/urandom/seed > /dev/urandom /sbin/entropy-saver load /var/lib/urandom/entropy and in /etc/rc.shutdown # Save random seed /bin/dd if=/dev/urandom of=/var/lib/urandom/seed count=1 2> /dev/null /sbin/entropy-saver save /var/lib/urandom/entropy So just in case someone sees boot hangs, that will help to unlock the RNG, by not wasting prescious entropy collected during uptime. It has been posted to LUGA and openssl-users in the past, a little bit of feedback i had and is in. [1] https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publications/Studies/LinuxRNG/LinuxRNG_EN.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=7 --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)