Elnareen says:
- LWN published an article one month ago on why this is a very bad idea (essentially, it makes the kernel thinks that he has entropy he has not, more explanations in the full article there:
https://lwn.net/Articles/525459/)
- You can do it without even running some cron regurlarly, and that's why that's an even worse trap for the system administrator in Linux in general (quoted from the same article):
Quote: Administrator recommendations
"You really, really want to run rngd", Peter said. It should be started as early as possible during system boot-up, so that the applications have early access to the randomness that it provides.
One thing you should not do is the following:
rngd -r /dev/urandom
Peter noted that he had seen this command in several places on the web. Its effect is to connect the output of the kernel's RNG back into itself, fooling the kernel into believing it has an endless supply of entropy.
This is exactly what this application does, and a text book example of what should never be done
(so no, don't include that in ROMs by default or use it at all !)