umber-kernel/drivers/char
Linus Torvalds 25c3e0de3b Remove WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM kernel config option
[ Upstream commit 7dff99b354601dd01829e1511711846e04340a69 ]

This config option goes way back - it used to be an internal debug
option to random.c (at that point called DEBUG_RANDOM_BOOT), then was
renamed and exposed as a config option as CONFIG_WARN_UNSEEDED_RANDOM,
and then further renamed to the current CONFIG_WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM.

It was all done with the best of intentions: the more limited
rate-limited reports were reporting some cases, but if you wanted to see
all the gory details, you'd enable this "ALL" option.

However, it turns out - perhaps not surprisingly - that when people
don't care about and fix the first rate-limited cases, they most
certainly don't care about any others either, and so warning about all
of them isn't actually helping anything.

And the non-ratelimited reporting causes problems, where well-meaning
people enable debug options, but the excessive flood of messages that
nobody cares about will hide actual real information when things go
wrong.

I just got a kernel bug report (which had nothing to do with randomness)
where two thirds of the the truncated dmesg was just variations of

   random: get_random_u32 called from __get_random_u32_below+0x10/0x70 with crng_init=0

and in the process early boot messages had been lost (in addition to
making the messages that _hadn't_ been lost harder to read).

The proper way to find these things for the hypothetical developer that
cares - if such a person exists - is almost certainly with boot time
tracing.  That gives you the option to get call graphs etc too, which is
likely a requirement for fixing any problems anyway.

See Documentation/trace/boottime-trace.rst for that option.

And if we for some reason do want to re-introduce actual printing of
these things, it will need to have some uniqueness filtering rather than
this "just print it all" model.

Fixes: cc1e127bfa ("random: remove ratelimiting for in-kernel unseeded randomness")
Acked-by: Jason Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
2026-03-04 07:20:46 -05:00
..
agp
hw_random hwrng: core - use RCU and work_struct to fix race condition 2026-02-26 14:59:06 -08:00
ipmi ipmi: ipmb: initialise event handler read bytes 2026-03-04 07:20:44 -05:00
mwave
tpm char: tpm: cr50: Remove IRQF_ONESHOT 2026-03-04 07:19:43 -05:00
xilinx_hwicap
xillybus
Kconfig
Makefile
adi.c
apm-emulation.c
applicom.c
applicom.h
bsr.c
ds1620.c
dsp56k.c
dtlk.c
hangcheck-timer.c
hpet.c
lp.c
mem.c
misc.c
misc_minor_kunit.c char: misc: Use IS_ERR() for filp_open() return value 2026-02-26 14:59:32 -08:00
nsc_gpio.c
nvram.c
nwbutton.c
nwbutton.h
nwflash.c
pc8736x_gpio.c
powernv-op-panel.c
ppdev.c
ps3flash.c
random.c Remove WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM kernel config option 2026-03-04 07:20:46 -05:00
scx200_gpio.c
sonypi.c
tlclk.c
toshiba.c
ttyprintk.c
uv_mmtimer.c
virtio_console.c