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I have seen some messages mentioning "random read" during the boot process, so I went and checked dmesg and found these lines:

[ 7.563793] random: init: uninitialized urandom read (12 bytes read, 48 bits of entropy available)

[ 8.614769] random: mountall: uninitialized urandom read (12 bytes read, 64 bits of entropy available)

[ 10.892396] random: lsb_release: uninitialized urandom read (24 bytes read, 96 bits of entropy available)

What are these random bits used for during boot and why?

Also, the urandom read is "uninitialized". What does this mean?

I am using Ubuntu 14.04 (kernel 4.4.0-127).

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  • I suppose that the system gathers here some numbers coming from the hardware in order to get "real" random numbers afterwards. The "entropy available" is a kind of measure for the randomness of random number. You can see the current value with sudo cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail.
    – muclux
    Jun 7, 2018 at 17:03
  • Given that more than 10 days have passed since the question was asked and that the view count is rather low...would this kind of question receive more attention on some other site/forum? Jun 18, 2018 at 18:52

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