There are some places early in the kernel boot where "random" numbers are needed but they don't need to be truly unpredictable. A similar approach is used for

There are some places early in the kernel boot where "random" numbers are needed but they don't need to be truly unpredictable. A similar approach is used for time: If part of the kernel boot process looks at the clock but we don't have a real clock running yet, just return the values "0", "1", "2", etc. as the time since what really matters is that they are monotonically increasing.