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I'd like to pass the host's /dev/urandom device through to a qemu/kvm virtual machine.

Note that /dev/urandom is not seekable, so it's not possible to pass it through as a block device using -hda, -fda, or -sda.

I would expect that I should be able to pass it through as a serial device, but I can't see to get that working. The guest needs to be able to read random data from some device in /dev where that random data is served by the host.

I am well aware of virtio-rng in modern versions of qemu/kvm and that's not quite what I'm looking for.

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    Why do you want to do this? The guest OS should have its own random number generator...
    – voretaq7
    Oct 12, 2012 at 15:50
  • I can see a way to do what you are asking but it seems terribly kludgy: cron script pulls a buffers worth of data on host OS into a file (cat), copy it into a file which has a filesystem (dd mke2fs cp), which is loop mounted and shared into kvm to its guest ... yuck.
    – adric
    Oct 12, 2012 at 22:08

1 Answer 1

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For /dev/urandom you don't need to do anything.

For /dev/random KVM provides a paravirtualized random number generator to its (Linux) guests. This allows guests to use the host's entropy pool. To use it, make sure that HW_RANDOM_VIRTIO is set in your guest kernel configuration.

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  • Read the first paragraph, then.
    – Michael Hampton
    Oct 12, 2012 at 20:29
  • Okay, so virtio-rng is a module. It loads via modprobe. Now what? Should that create a new device, or just populate /dev/random?
    – Dustin Kirkland
    Oct 12, 2012 at 20:50
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    Sorry, but when you ask for something that sounds like a very bad idea here, you are going to be asked about it, and should be prepared to justify it. We have a very strong culture of "do it right or not at all" here.
    – Michael Hampton
    Oct 16, 2012 at 18:42
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    The question asks, "Is it possible..." to do something very specific. I've read the documentation. I've contacted the QEMU upstream developers. I haven't found the answer I'm looking for, and so I turned to StackExchange. If the answer to my question is "no", and that can be justified, I'm perfectly fine with that. I'll gladly +1 that, and select as the correct answer.
    – Dustin Kirkland
    Oct 17, 2012 at 2:09
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    Again, that's because you're almost certainly asking the wrong question and need to rethink what you're doing.
    – Michael Hampton
    Oct 17, 2012 at 11:16

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