/dev/random Seeing Performance Work For Linux 5.7
First up for boosting the /dev/random performance on the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel is making use of batched CRNG output in place of the CPU RNG instructions in order to deliver better performance. This is an improvement made by WireGuard's Jason Donenfeld after noting the RdRand instruction can be quite slow. With this batched entropy for get random, his accepted patch delivers better performance and also fits better from a security perspective.
The other performance improvement is credited/trusted RNG support for AArch64 hardware. This is about improving /dev/random performance for some 64-bit ARM SoCs where they have RNG instructions on some CPU cores but not others (such as in certain big.LITTLE setups). This ARM64 RNG instruction usage will now be properly handled for delivering better performance.
These random improvements are part of the Linux 5.7 kernel that is currently going through its merge window and should debut as stable in early June.
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