What does this mean: "Entropy pool not available to seed RNG; using ad-hoc entropy sources"?

General Usage
1

I am trying to use a package (Laplacians: https://github.com/danspielman/Laplacians.jl) with Julia- v1.0.4. However, I get the following message(error) when I use it:

“Entropy pool not available to seed RNG; using ad-hoc entropy sources.”

The package says that it works with Julia -v1.0.0 and I assume that it should be fine with v1.0.4 too (am I right?)

When I use the package with Julia v0.0.7, I don’t get this message but I get some warnings that some functions should be replaced.

2

It is coming from make_seed(). It cannot use the randomness source from your OS for some reason, so it will be computing a seed from the time hash. This is most likely something you can ignore for normal applications.

What OS are you using?

3

I am using Windows 10. So why I don’t get this message when I switch to Julia-v0.0.7 then?

4

I assume you mean v0.7. The source code for this didn’t change since then, so I am assuming that this is something else. Eg you may not see this message if the OS has time to replenish the entropy source by the time you start the other version (because you use the keyboard, mouse, etc).

I am not using Windows, so I can’t help you investigate this further. But again, this should not be a concern unless you are doing cryptography.

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5

Yeah, this isn’t related to the Laplacians package at all — and almost certainly isn’t going to pose any problems for you. If you’d like to help us nail down where it’s going wrong, though, you could post the output of the following:

julia> import Random: RandomDevice

julia> rand(RandomDevice(), UInt32, 4)
4-element Array{UInt32,1}:
 0x03b66465
 0x59b9037e
 0x7fe5ee09
 0x0a5d16e0

I’m guessing it may error on your machine.

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