In the making the past two years by developer Jason Donenfeld (of WireGuard fame) is [1]adding getrandom() to the vDSO in the name of better performance . In some tests this has yielded [2]as much as a ~15x speed-up to performance for user-space obtaining crypographically secure random number generation. It's looking like for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window, this work will finally be merged.

Recently there's been renewed work by Jason Donenfeld in getting getrandom() in the vDSO over the finish line. As noted last month [3]the latest code has been looking good and hopeful and it continues looking that way with the "v20" patches sent out today.

Donenfeld reaffirmed his intent on submitting these getrandom() in the vDSO patches for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window. The plan at this point is merging it in through his random.git tree for the Linux 6.11 kernel. The v20 patches are now out on the [4]Linux kernel mailing list .

More details on the implementation can be found via [5]this patch message .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-getrandom-vDSO

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-getrandom-vDSO-v2

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Random-vDSO-2024

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240703183115.1075219-1-Jason@zx2c4.com/

[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240703183115.1075219-5-Jason@zx2c4.com/