Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Random Number Generation on Modern Systems
Stephan Müller recently pointed out that /dev/random has been showing signs of age relative to modern environments like embedded systems, solid-state drives, massively parallel systems, and virtualized systems. The problem is how to identify good sources of entropy on all systems, so that /dev/random really does produce random numbers that are equally random across all environments.
Stephan's approach, LRNG (Linux Random Number Generator), seeks to solve that problem and especially to provide proper entropy sources during boot time. He also wanted LRNG to have a lower performance effect on parallel systems and allow accelerated cryptographic primitives. Crypto primitives are simple, reliable tools that are used as building blocks of larger scale security systems. Massively parallel systems have to implement security protocols on all nodes, and having good cryptographic speed can benefit that.
Stephan gave a link to a scholarly article he'd written that described his approach [1]. Beyond the technical details, Stephan chose to release his design under a dual license – either the GPL (version number unspecified) or a more BSD-ish license that allowed closed-source binary distribution.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.