Linux 6.1 Continues Improving The RNG & Crypto Code

The random number generator "RNG" and crypto subsystem pull requests have already been submitted for the Linux 6.1 merge window.

Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame continues spending a lot of time working to clean-up Linux's RNG code. For Linux 6.1 the RNG code has seen a regression fix come around O_NONBLOCK that broke user-space some two years ago, a performance regression fix, using randomness from hardware RNGs earlier in the boot process, and a variety of other smaller changes to the RNG code that has been undergoing a lot of improvements as of late.

The full list of RNG changes for Linux 6.1 can be found via this pull request.

In somewhat related news, the crypto subsystem updates have also been submitted by Herbert Xu. On the crypto side this cycle there is an API change for feeding untrusted RNGs into /dev/random, ARS-NI/AVX/x86_64/GFNI assembler implementations of the Aria cipher, the HACE crypto driver is added for ASpeed hardware, and a variety of other changes. See this pull request for all of the crypto feature changes targeting Linux 6.1.