Re: Linux 5.3-rc8

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 5:07 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Ted, comments? I'd hate to revert the ext4 thing just because it
> > happens to expose a bad thing in user space.
>
> Unfortuantely, I very much doubt this is going to work.  That's
> because the add_disk_randomness() path is only used for legacy
> /dev/random [...]
>
> Also, because by default, the vast majority of disks have
> /sys/block/XXX/queue/add_random set to zero by default.

Gaah. I was looking at the input randomness, since I thought that was
where the added randomness that Ahmed got things to work with came
from.

And that then made me just look at the legacy disk randomness (for the
obvious disk IO reasons) and I didn't look further.

> So the the way we get entropy these days for initializing the CRNG is
> via the add_interrupt_randomness() path, where do something really
> fast, and we assume that we get enough uncertainity from 8 interrupts
> to give us one bit of entropy (64 interrupts to give us a byte of
> entropy), and that we need 512 bits of entropy to consider the CRNG
> fully initialized.  (Yeah, there's a lot of conservatism in those
> estimates, and so what we could do is decide to say, cut down the
> number of bits needed to initialize the CRNG to be 256 bits, since
> that's the size of the CHACHA20 cipher.)

So that's 4k interrupts if I counted right, and yeah, maybe Ahmed was
just close enough before, and the merging of the inode table IO then
took him below that limit.

> Ultimately, though, we need to find *some* way to fix userspace's
> assumptions that they can always get high quality entropy in early
> boot, or we need to get over people's distrust of Intel and RDRAND.

Well, even on a PC, sometimes rdrand just isn't there. AMD has screwed
it up a few times, and older Intel chips just don't have it.

So I'd be inclined to either lower the limit regardless - and perhaps
make the "user space asked for randomness much too early" be a big
*warning* instead of being a basically fatal hung machine?

                Linus