On 2/11/19 8:42 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Mon, 2019-02-11 at 08:28 -0700, Jens Axboe wrote:
>> On 2/11/19 8:25 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2019-02-10 at 09:35 -0700, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>>> On 2/10/19 9:25 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
>>>>> On Sun, 2019-02-10 at 09:05 -0700, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>>>>> On 2/10/19 8:44 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
>>>>>>> On Sun, 2019-02-10 at 10:17 +0100, Mikael Pettersson wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 7:19 PM James Bottomley
>>>>>>>> <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> [...]
>>>>>>>>> I think the reason for this is that the block mq path
>>>>>>>>> doesn't feed the kernel entropy pool correctly, hence
>>>>>>>>> the need to install an entropy gatherer for systems
>>>>>>>>> that don't have other good random number sources.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> That does sound plausible, I admit I didn't even consider
>>>>>>>> the possibility that the old block I/O path also was an
>>>>>>>> entropy source.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> In theory, the new one should be as well since the
>>>>>>> rotational entropy collector is on the SCSI completion
>>>>>>> path. I'd seen the same problem but had assumed it was
>>>>>>> something someone had done to our internal entropy pool and
>>>>>>> thus hadn't bisected it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The difference is that the old stack included ADD_RANDOM by
>>>>>> default, so this check:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> if (blk_queue_add_random(q))
>>>>>> add_disk_randomness(req->rq_disk);
>>>>>>
>>>>>> in scsi_end_request() would be true, and we'd add the
>>>>>> randomness. For sd, it seems to set it just fine for non-
>>>>>> rotational drives. Could this be because other devices don't?
>>>>>> Maybe the below makes a difference.
>>>>>
>>>>> No, in both we set it per the rotational parameters of the disk
>>>>> in
>>>>>
>>>>> sd.c:sd_read_block_characteristics()
>>>>>
>>>>> rot = get_unaligned_be16(&buffer[4]);
>>>>>
>>>>> if (rot == 1) {
>>>>>
>>>>> blk_queue_flag_set(QUEUE_FLAG_NONROT, q);
>>>>>
>>>>> blk_queue_flag_clear(QUEUE_FLAG_ADD_RANDOM, q);
>>>>> } else {
>>>>>
>>>>> blk_queue_flag_clear(QUEUE_FLAG_NONROT, q);
>>>>>
>>>>> blk_queue_flag_set(QUEUE_FLAG_ADD_RANDOM, q);
>>>>> }
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> That check wasn't changed by the code removal.
>>>>
>>>> As I said above, for sd. This isn't true for non-disks.
>>>
>>> Yes, but the behaviour above doesn't change across a switch to MQ,
>>> so I don't quite understand how it bisects back to that change. If
>>> we're not gathering entropy for the device now, we wouldn't have
>>> been before the switch, so the entropy characteristics shouldn't
>>> have changed.
>>
>> But it does, as I also wrote in that first email. The legacy queue
>> flags had QUEUE_FLAG_ADD_RANDOM set by default, the MQ ones do not.
>> Hence any non-sd device would previously ALWAYS have ADD_RANDOM
>> set, now none of them do. Also see the patch I sent.
>
> So your theory is that the disk in question never gets to the
> rotational check? because the check will clear the flag if it's non-
> rotational and set it if it's not, so the default state of the flag
> shouldn't matter.
No, my point is about non-disks, devices that aren't driven by sd. The
behavior for sd hasn't changed, as it sets/clears it unconditionally.
That's not true for something driven by sr, for instance, and anything
else non-sd. For those we defaulted to adding randomness for !scsi-mq,
and default to not adding randomness for scsi-mq.
The patch I included would have the same behavior for scsi-mq as we had
for non-mq.
--
Jens Axboe
