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by rafekett 4442 days ago
overreliance on /dev/urandom in the presence of little entropy is a well known performance problem on servers. that's why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generato... exist
3 comments

If I understand that problem correctly, it has nothing to do with the amount of entropy available but is a simple synchronisation/locking issue. Were reads from, say, /dev/zero ‘protected’ by spinlocks in the same way, the same issue would arise. Conversely, I don’t see how adding a hardware RNG to the system could alleviate the locking issue.
A hardware RNG isn't going to do anything to address the scalability problems inherent in having a single shared lock around /dev/urandom.
/dev/urandom is not /dev/random.