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Re:RDRAND on AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is flakey by klmadfejno on Monday January 11, 2021 @03:04PM (#25735617)
That doesn't seem to answer the question of why use it
Re:RDRAND on AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is flakey by numpad0 on Monday January 11, 2021 @03:23PM (#25736024)
It generally makes more sense to trust CPU specifications and utilize it fully, than to assume everything is tampered with and only ever use `mov`
Re:RDRAND on AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is flakey by tadfisher on Monday January 11, 2021 @03:22PM (#25735995)
If they don't use it, the kernel does in order to initialize the entropy pool, which will also result in broken boots. To work around historically flaky kernel implementations, systemd calls RDRAND directly if it detects it needs to with a heuristic. This is why the fix for the current issue is to set both 'nordrand' and 'SYSTEMD_RDRAND=0'.
Re:RDRAND on AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is flakey by tedunangst on Monday January 11, 2021 @04:43PM (#25737696)
What happened to it's not systemd's job to fix kernel bugs?
Re:RDRAND on AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is flakey by tadfisher on Monday January 11, 2021 @05:36PM (#25738585)
I didn't type that, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. systemd is fundamentally tied to Linux and thus needs to implement workarounds from time-to-time when kernel facilities are lacking. This is complicated by the requirement that systemd continue working on older Linux versions.