Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/919008/

Most developers probably do not see the generation of random numbers as
being a performance bottleneck for their programs, but there are seemingly
exceptions. Over the last few years, Jason Donenfeld has brought a new
level of energy to the development of the kernel’s random-number generator;
he is now directing his efforts toward improving performance for user space
with this patch
series that provides an implementation of the getrandom()
system call in the kernel’s “virtual dynamic
shared object” (vDSO) area. The result is, indeed, better performance,
but not all developers see this benefit as being worth the additional
complexity required to achieve it.