[Python-Dev] BDFL ruling request: should we block forever waiting for high-quality random bits?

[Sebastian Krause]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> it seems to me that you'd want such a solution to have code that
>> causes the initialization of the entropy pool to be sped up so that it
>> happens as quickly as possible (if that is even possible).  Is it
>> possible? (E.g. by causing the machine to start doing things other
>> than just CPython?)
>
> I don't think that's something which the Python interpreter ought to do 
> for you, but you can write to /dev/urandom or /dev/random (both keep 
> their own, separate, entropy pools):

There are projects like http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/ that use
some tiny timing fluctuations in CPUs to feed the entropy pool and
which are available in most Linux distributions. But as you said,
that is something completely outside of Python's scope.