Haveged on ReadyNas Ultra ?

RichieB wrote:
Using /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random does not give you more randomness.

Thank you, RichieB. I shouldn't post at 4:00 in the morning.

I think that what I wanted (and failed) to say was that I would expect LMS to seed its own (long period) PRNG from dev/random or dev/urandom just once, but that instead it looks as though it is using dev/urandom directly, or maybe re-seeding its PRNG repeatedly with the same value from /dev/random.

RichieB wrote:
With LMS 7.6.x I went trough the code and it used a default MySQL random feature, which (I'm sure) uses /dev/random or /dev/urandom. LMS 7.7.x and 7.8.x use SQLite, and I haven't checked how the random playlists are created. .... I have been running haveged on my QNAP TS-459 Pro+ for a week now, and it positively solves this issue.

If 7.7 and 7.8 use sqlite's built-in random() function to select a random sequence of rows, I don't see how increasing the available entropy would fix the problem. As far as I know, the random() function returns the output of a PRNG based on RC4 which is seeded only once from /dev/urandom.

But I'm no expert on any of this. I guess the important thing is that it works, not why it works.