hat's slow. ... The solution is to provide a limited amount of random data to the starting process in the aux vector. I suggested 16 bytes and this is what the patch implements. If we need only 16 bytes or less we use the data directly. If we need more we'll use the 16 bytes to see a PRNG. This avoids the costly /dev/urandom use and it allows the kernel to use the most adequate source of random data for this purpose. It might not be the same pool as that for /dev/urandom. Concerns were expressed about the depletion of the randomness pool. But this patch doesn't make the situation worse, it doesn't deplete entropy more than happens now. Signed-off-by: Kees Cook Cc: Jakub Jelinek Cc: Andi Kleen Cc: Ulrich Drepper Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds