linux/kernel/configs
Linus Torvalds 7dff99b354 Remove WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM kernel config option
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>
2026-02-23 11:18:48 -08:00
..
debug.config Remove WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM kernel config option 2026-02-23 11:18:48 -08:00
hardening.config kcfi: Rename CONFIG_CFI_CLANG to CONFIG_CFI 2025-09-24 14:29:14 -07:00
kvm_guest.config kbuild: Show marked Kconfig fragments in "help" 2023-09-04 02:04:20 +09:00
nopm.config kbuild: Show marked Kconfig fragments in "help" 2023-09-04 02:04:20 +09:00
rust.config kbuild: Show marked Kconfig fragments in "help" 2023-09-04 02:04:20 +09:00
tiny-base.config treewide: drop CONFIG_EMBEDDED 2023-08-21 13:46:25 -07:00
tiny.config tinyconfig: enable CONFIG_LD_DEAD_CODE_DATA_ELIMINATION 2025-06-06 05:40:24 +09:00
x86_debug.config kbuild: Show marked Kconfig fragments in "help" 2023-09-04 02:04:20 +09:00
xen.config xen: enable XEN_UNPOPULATED_ALLOC as part of xen.config 2025-05-23 07:07:09 +02:00