On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 8:26 AM, Europus <europus@gmail.com> wrote:
... On another board, this is being called a PRNG. One point that is raised, if it was truly an RNG then it wouldn't be necessary to mix the outputs from two laser assemblies.
i was focused on the whitened vs. raw entropy in the previous post and overlooked the point you were getting at. it is good practice to use more than one hardware entropy source in a system. (on VIA's boards, only the first gen C5XL cores had a single source, after that two are always present). if one fails you have a backup and combined they can double throughput. if your requirements necessitate a high throughput hardware (true) entropy source you can't fall back on software and host entropy scavenging - it's just too slow. so you get two or more sources and expect at least one to be functional for the lifetime of the system. there doesn't seem to be any additional technical detail about this setup so perhaps we'll find out more later... best regards,