Blocking /dev/random has been a problem that many people were interested about for a long time, and it has had alternatives: /dev/urandom since forever (though

Blocking /dev/random has been a problem that many people were interested about for a long time, and it has had alternatives: /dev/urandom since forever (though it has a big problem for some short period just after bootup), getentropy() since 2015 can do the right thing with the right options, and finally since 2020 /dev/random does the right thing - it only blocks until seeded, then gives unlimited secure random bytes. (I only learned about this 2020 update in this very thread!) My understanding is that /dev/random behavior persisted for so long only due to some dumb corporate/military compliance thing that some huge companies "needed". EDIT: apparently this was due to NIST standard SP800-90B and maybe German AIS 31, and the most recent idea is to forget them, and have orgs that really need the strange/problematic blocking behavior implement it in user-space.