rng-tools-debian (2.5) unstable; urgency=low

  A systemd unit is now present in addition to the sysvinit script.
  The inner workings of the unit are subject to future improvement,
  but it generally starts rngd exactly the same as the init script,
  so it’s no regression. The question of how exactly rngd should be
  started these days is not easy to answer, and the unit just fills
  the hole left by the unit generator removal. On “modern” systems,
  rng-tools5 should probably be used instead if actively maintained
  and rng-tools-debian has use cases in legacy systems and specific
  tricks like pulling entropy over the network, which doesn’t start
  the dæmon from the init script anyway. If wishing to start it via
  udev/hotplug and the device needs rngd to run, see below, disable
  the initscript/unit and write a machine-specific integration.

  On contemporary Linux kernels, for devices using the hwrng subsy‐
  stem, the kernel polls the active one periodically automatically,
  so, normally, rngd does n̲o̲t̲ need to run any more for such devices
  (e.g. virtio_rng or an RPi’s 20104000.rng; load all modules, then
  cat /sys/devices/virtual/misc/hw_random/rng_available to discover
  options) unless you have more than one, as only the active one is
  auto-polled (HRNGSELECT in /etc/default/rng-tools-debian sets the
  active one). Therefore if HRNGDEVICE is not set and autodetection
  finds /dev/hwrng the dæmon is (silently) not started any more.

  See also: /usr/share/doc/rng-tools-debian/README.gz

 -- Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>  Sun, 12 Jan 2025 01:39:39 +0100

rng-tools-debian (2.2) unstable; urgency=medium

  This package took over the heavily extended 2.x branch of rng-tools.
  Please test whether rng-tools5 is enough for your use cases, and if
  so, consider switching to it.

  Devices are now checked whether they allow reading data before using
  unless HRNGDEVICE is set in /etc/default/rng-tools-debian manually.
  If no usable device can be found the init script no longer errors out
  (but does syslog it), so installing the package without a HWRNG is
  now possible without errors. HRNGSELECT, for e.g. choosing virtio-rng,
  is executed before these tests.

  Please consider loading any modules necessary in the initramfs so they
  are available early enough for the device to be online when rngd starts.

  rngd is currently started via initscript or manually; starting via udev
  is being discussed and will probably be implemented in bookworm.

 -- Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>  Wed, 11 Nov 2020 02:07:20 +0100
