Awesome

fastrandom - fast random source for (over)writing disk partitions/images

Filling up the storage to be used as source for dmcrypt using the output from /dev/urandom can take a long time since the latter is quite slow. openssl rand is a few times faster, but I figured that I'd like something still faster than that, here's the result.

It intends to be using complementary-multiply-with-carry by George Marsaglia, taking code posted on gamedev.net. On the latter page there has been discussion of not understanding that implementation. So, don't rely on it producing unpredictable data. In an attempt to ensure even distribution even if the used algorithm is partially faulty, the program is mixing the result of the Marsaglia generator (or ripoff?) with some output from /dev/urandom (using bitwise XOR). This may be a moot exercise, though.

At least the resulting program is fast enough for my purpose, it generates about 100MB/s on an Atom D510 @ 1.66GHz.

Installation

This has been written and tested on Debian only.

Run

make
time ./fastrandom |head -c 100000000|wc -c

for testing, or

make install

for installation.