Generating cryptographic keys needs a lot of entropy. Especially gnupg --gen-key
depletes the kernel entropy pool (/dev/random) quite fast and may appear to be
stuck when it's waiting for new entropy.
If you wonder how to speed this up consider installing rng-tools
if this is available on your platform.
After installing rng-tools please make sure rngd is actually running and
replenishing your entropy pool.
You can do so by keeping a watch on your available entropy and running an entropy consuming process as follows:
watch -n1 cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail
# switch to another terminal / screen
cat /dev/random | rngtest -c 1000The second command should complete within a few seconds and report no errors. If it takes much longer you probably don't have an hardware RNG and will have to generate some entropy by triggering some network activity and input.
You should avoid havaged.
sudo apt-get install rng-toolssudo yum install rng-tools