Embodiments herein describe techniques for synchronizing LFSRs located on two compute devices. To synchronize the LFSRs, a first one of the compute devices may transmit a first training block that includes a predefined bit sequence. The training block is scrambled by a transmitting (TX) LFSR on the first compute device and then transmitted to the second compute device. The second compute device performs an XOR operation to recover the outputs of the TX LFSR that were used to scramble the data. The second compute device can use the outputs of the TX LFSR to determine future outputs of the TX LFSR. These future outputs are then used to initialize a receiving (RX) LFSR on the second compute device. Now, when subsequent training blocks are received, the second compute device can use the initialized RX LFSR to descramble the scrambled training blocks.