In the latest release 5.3 of the Linux kernel, a last-minute change in file system operations has been dropped. Linus Torvalds explains in the release announcement that the change itself was not flawed, but indirectly caused applications in userspace to stop working correctly. The background: The change caused less entropy due to disk operations, causing the random number generator to initialize later.
For some years, Linux has a syscall called getrandom (). This command, which allows an application to query random numbers from the kernel, should fix problems with the previous interfaces. Traditionally, Linux has two virtual devices – / dev / random and / dev / urandom – from which applications can read random numbers.
Source: https://www.golem.de/news/linux-kernel-bootprobleme-wegen-fehlender-zufallszahlen-1909-143906.html
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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