Re:RDRAND on AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is flakey
by garaetjjte on Monday January 11, 2021 @03:02PM
(#25735586)
As much as I don't like systemd this probably was reasonable decision back at the time. systemd needs entropy for generating some random identifiers during early boot. Trying to read it from kernel random facilities might block infinitely until kernel 5.4. Before that pulling entropy from RDRAND might not be that unreasonable decision, nowadays it probably should just call getrandom().
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But why does systemd need random identifiers during early boot? I can understand the need for seeding a hash table (but even there, they already admit that the code can re-seed at any time), but I don't see why a boot program should rely on random id generation in the first place.