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You don't always have randomness available at boot



Sure but if it is hard baked into the distro it is no longer random any more than '4' is random.


It's a good thing most non-embedded systems have moved to event/dependency based inits then. Otherwise, you'll have to generate RNG state at install or image personalisation time and store RNG state between reboots to preserve available entropy. In the worst case, the system won't have persistent storage (to store RNG state for next boot) -- that's a rather specialised case and, in general, such systems have hardware randomness sources. Either way, it's a rather niche problem.




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