Linux

Following yesterday's Linux 7.0-rc1 release, Linus Torvalds authored and merged a patch to get rid of the Linux kernel's WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM Kconfig option. While that option was added with good intentions, on some systems it can yield a lot of unnecessary kernel log spam.

The WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM option has for many years been part of the Linux kernel and enabling it will provide a warning whenever there is a use of unseeded randomness within the kernel. To help spot situations of random number generation use prior to being able to securely use RNG on the system, this option was added long ago to help spot such uses of unseeded randomness by kernel code. But due to caveats on some CPUs around a fully-seeded CRNG, the WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM can become like an endless stream of spam. After encountering a bug report where much of the kernel log were just messages about unseeded randomness and in turn losing some of the initial boot log, Torvalds had enough and gutted out this option.