New Linux /dev/random RNG Revved For The 43rd Time

Going on for more than a half-decade now has been the effort around Linux Random Number Generator as a new /dev/random implementation for Linux. After more than five years, LRNG continues to work towards being mainlined and today marks the 43rd revision to these patches.

LRNG continues baking as a "production ready" implementation of /dev/random that follows different design changes from the existing kernel implementation. It is though a drop-in replacement with the same API/ABI.

Lead LRNG developer Stephan Müller believes this implementation is superior to the status quo thanks to improvements to its crypto handling, better scalability with large parallel systems, up to 130% faster performance in the critical code path, a variety of other performance advantages, better tooling and testing, and a lot of configurable features.

LRNG v43 continues to seek out to be a /dev/random replacement for the Linux kernel.

The v43 patches to LRNG have improvements for handling if configured to have zero entropy, compression support for CPU entropy sources without full entropy, and various other fixes and low-level code improvements. Learn more about LRNG from the presentation embedded below from last month's Linux Security Summit.

We'll see how much longer until if/when this new /dev/random implementation is ready for the mainline Linux kernel. The v43 patches can be found on the kernel mailing list.