Are the RDRAND/RDSEED officially supported? I assume (you know how that goes!!) that since RDRAND/RDSEED do not need any privileges they pass thru to the hardware.
Hi @SterlingG, RDRAND is officially supported, while RDSEED is not. If you give me the details about the task you want to perform, I try to give you more information if it's possible to do in a virtual machine.
I am testing a port of a large Monte Carlo simulation (to linux Mint). Need both RDSEED and RDRAND. According to Intel, both should work ... neither needs privileges to operate (see for example - Intel® Digital Random Number Generator (DRNG) Software Implementation Guide May 2014) from that document -- " Random values are delivered directly through instruction level requests (RDRAND and RDSEED). This bypasses both operating system and software library handling of the request. The DRNG is scalable enough to support heavy server application workloads. Within the context of virtualization, the DRNG's stateless design and atomic instruction access mean that RDRAND and RDSEED can be used freely by multiple VMs without the need for hypervisor intervention or resource management. "
I found my problem ... its hard to dig out but RDRAND and RDSEED were introduced in different processor families. RDRAND in Ivybridge and RDSEED in Broadwell ... my test system is Ivybridge ... see https://superuser.com/questions/999...architecture-isa-is-rdrand-and-rdseed-part-of
