It Didn't Make It For Linux 4.13, But A New Random Number Generator Still In The Works

Frequent Phoronix readers may recall that for more than one year a new Linux Random Number Generator has been in-development and today marked the 12th version of these patches being released.

This new random number generator, LRNG, aims to provide sufficient entropy during the boot time and in virtual environments as well as when using SSDs or DM targets. LRNG has been in development by Stephan Müller.

With this 12th version of the patches, he's hoping the code is ready for review and inclusion into the mainline Linux kernel. It's too late for Linux 4.13 with that merge window having passed, but if the review goes well, it's possible we could see the new LRNG for Linux 4.14.

These updated random number generator patches have a number of fixes, supports using the RDSEED instruction for seeding operations and RDRAND as a fallback, and various other tuning to the random number generator code.

More details via this patch series. So far no major comments in response to indicate the likelihood that this new /dev/random will be merged to the mainline kernel in the near future, so stay tuned.