Skip to content
  • Linus Torvalds's avatar
    Merge branch 'entropy' · 3f2dc279
    Linus Torvalds authored
    Merge active entropy generation updates.
    
    This is admittedly partly "for discussion".  We need to have a way
    forward for the boot time deadlocks where user space ends up waiting for
    more entropy, but no entropy is forthcoming because the system is
    entirely idle just waiting for something to happen.
    
    While this was triggered by what is arguably a user space bug with
    GDM/gnome-session asking for secure randomness during early boot, when
    they didn't even need any such truly secure thing, the issue ends up
    being that our "getrandom()" interface is prone to that kind of
    confusion, because people don't think very hard about whether they want
    to block for sufficient amounts of entropy.
    
    The approach here-in is to decide to not just passively wait for entropy
    to happen, but to start actively collecting it if it is missing.  This
    is not necessarily always possible, but if the architecture has a CPU
    cycle counter, there is a fair amount of noise in the exact timings of
    reasonably complex loads.
    
    We may end up tweaking the load and the entropy estimates, but this
    should be at least a reasonable starting point.
    
    As part of this, we also revert the revert of the ext4 IO pattern
    improvement that ended up triggering the reported lack of external
    entropy.
    
    * getrandom() active entropy waiting:
      Revert "Revert "ext4: make __ext4_get_inode_loc plug""
      random: try to actively add entropy rather than passively wait for it
    3f2dc279