That would explain why I wasn't able to find "CONFIG_RANDOM_BLOCK" in my kernel configs.

On a related note, I've been running jitterentropy-rngd on most of my machines for a long while now, including the ones that have internal and/or external HWRNGs (even though it's probably not really doing much of anything on most of them).

I'm far from an expert on any of this but jitterentropy-rngd seems much, much better than haveged (although, FWIW, I think pretty much anything is better than haveged). I was kinda surprised that Debian decided to use haveged in the installer, although (to their credit) they did say, in effect, "we need something now, this works for now, we can find something better later".

According to the commit log, the kernel adds a timer loop to generate some entropy. So getrandom() still blocks, but kernel is adding jitter entropy to seed the pool so the wait time should be minimal.