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An open source and free entropy gathering daemon EGD (Entropy Gathering Daemon) is a standalone daemon that sits around running various statistics collection programs (ps, vmstat, iostat, etc). It hashes the results into an "entropy pool". If things happen on your system at relatively random and unpredictable times, then some of that randomness will become a part of the entropy pool and can be used to generate random numbers. EGD is basically a user-space implementation of the Linux kernel /dev/random device. As such, EGD should be runnable on all UNIX-like systems. EGD is intended to make up for the lack of /dev/random on non-Linux systems so that applications like GPG can beThis daemon should be allowed to run for a long time. It only gathers a small amount of entropy at a time, because many system statistics do not change very frequently and are rather predictable if sampled too quickly. It does not require any special privileges to run, but it may be reasonable for a sysadmin to arrange for it to be started at boot time, allowing it to be used by all users. The daemon provides a socket interface (either UNIX-style or TCP) from which the entropy can be read. For the exact protocol, see the notes at the end of the daemon source. Blocking and non-blocking reads are available, as well as a call to get the amount of entropy available in the pool. The entropy level is raised by running gatherer programs (which happens automatically over time) and adding their output; it is lowered by clients reading entropy. Once the count goes to zero, no entropy can be read until some more is generated. There is currently no equivalent to the Linux /dev/urandom device, which provides exactly this read-when-entropy-is-empty capability (at this point the data returned is no longer truly random, merely cryptographically strong).

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