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When I shut down Fedora12 I get a statement like this

saving random seed ...                     [OK]

Why does it save this random seed? What is it used for?

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I'm guessing so that the system would be able to generate better random numbers the next time it boots up.
Normally the entropy of the random numbers depends on how long the system has been running. If the system saves a random seed from the previous session, it can continue on that.

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Check out the last paragraph in en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random#Linux – trolle3000 Jul 28 '10 at 9:34
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