The NX accelerator has random number generation capabilities.
What what happens if the random-number entropy pool runs out of numbers? If you are reading from the /dev/random device, your application will block waiting for new numbers to be generated. Alternatively the urandom device is non-blocking, and will create random numbers on the fly, re-using some of the entropy in the pool. This can lead to numbers that are less random than required for some use cases.
Well, the Power9 and Power10 servers use the nest accelerator to generate the pseudo random numbers and maintains the pool.
Each processor chip in a Power9 and Power10 server has an on-chip “nest” accelerator called the NX unit that provides specialized functions for general data compression, gzip compression, encryption, and random number generation. These accelerators are used transparently across the systems software stack to speed up operations related to Live Partition Migration, IPSec, JFS2 Encrypted File Systems, PKCS11 encryption, and random number generation through /dev/random and /dev/urandom.
Kind of cool, I’ll have to find some more details to verify it and use it.
