On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 12:22:17PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> Perhaps userland could register a helper that takes over and does
> something better?
If userland sees the failure it can do whatever the developer/distro
packager thought suitable for the system facing this condition.
> But I think the kernel really should do something
> vaguely reasonable all by itself.
Definitely, that's what Linus' proposal was doing. Sleeping for some time
is what I call "vaguely reasonable".
> If nothing else, we want the ext4
> patch that provoked this whole discussion to be applied,
Oh absolutely!
> which means
> that we need to unbreak userspace somehow, and returning garbage it to
> is not a good choice.
It depends how it's used. I'd claim that we certainly use randoms for
other things (such as ASLR/hashtables) *before* using them to generate
long lived keys thus we can have a bit more time to get some more
entropy before reaching the point of producing these keys.
> Here are some possible approaches that come to mind:
>
> int count;
> while (crng isn't inited) {
> msleep(1);
> }
>
> and modify add_timer_randomness() to at least credit a tiny bit to
> crng_init_cnt.
Without a timeout it's sure we'll still face some situations where
it blocks forever, which is the current problem.
> Or we do something like intentionally triggering readahead on some
> offset on the root block device.
You don't necessarily have such a device, especially when you're
in an initramfs. It's precisely where userland can be smarter. When
the caller is sfdisk for example, it does have more chances to try
to perform I/O than when it's a tiny http server starting to present
a configuration page.
> We should definitely not trigger *blocking* IO.
I think I agree.
> Also, I wonder if the real problem preventing the RNG from staring up
> is that the crng_init_cnt threshold is too high. We have a rather
> baroque accounting system, and it seems like we can accumulate and
> credit entropy for a very long time indeed without actually
> considering ourselves done.
I have no opinion on this, lacking the skills to evaluate the situation.
What I can say for sure is that I've faced the non-booting issue quite a
number of times on headless systems, and conversely in the 2.4 era, my
front reverse-proxy by then had the same SSH key as 89 other machines on
the net. So there's surely a sweet spot to find between those two extremes.
I tend to think that waiting *a little bit* for the *first* random is
acceptable, even 10-15s, by the time the user starts to think about
pressing the reset button the system might finish to boot. Hashing some
RAM locations and the RTC when present can also help a little bit. If
at least my machine by then had combined the RTC's date and time with
the hash, chances for a key collision would have gone down to one over
many thousands.
Willy
