A few years back, I came across some trick involving seeding entropy into Linux VMs to make them run faster. I still don't fully understand how (think it has to do with the fact that a lot of activity does involve crypto functions): HackADay has a good write-up on that. Here are some details on how to make this work…
- cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail → a Linux system not running Kernel 5.6 or newer is probably going to be hovering around 1000 on this. Having the newer kernel seems to bump that up to between 2000 and 3000.
- Haveged was a good way to seed the entropy pool pre-5.6; that's what got added into the kernel. The author recommends Jitter-RNG as an evolution of their work. On Debian/Ubuntu you can run apt install -y jitterentropy-rngd && systemctl restart jitterentropy-rngd to make use of this, even on a newer kernel; this seems to get you past 3000 on the pool. Online searches revealed versions of this for CentOS and Docker as well.
- rng-tools is a toolset that can be put to use on systems with newer hardware-based crypto. Redhat/CentOS/Fedora will have this as rng-tools package; Debian/Ubuntu has an rng-tools5 package you can install. Don't try this in a VM; if it doesn't work, uninstall it & try Jitter-RNG instead.
Happy crunching!