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
-
TUXEDO has unveiled a new InfinityBook Pro with an AMD Ryzen AI 300
This new notebook offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
Is This the Year of Linux?
Another major organization has decided to kick Windows and Office to the curb, in favor of Linux.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.