On Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 11:27:11AM +0200, Babis Chalios wrote: > Hi Greg, > > On 23/8/23 11:08, Greg KH wrote: > > CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you can confirm the sender and know the content is safe. > > > > > > > > On Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 11:01:05AM +0200, Babis Chalios wrote: > > > Sometimes, PRNGs need to reseed. For example, on a regular timer > > > interval, to ensure nothing consumes a random value for longer than e.g. > > > 5 minutes, or when VMs get cloned, to ensure seeds don't leak in to > > > clones. > > > > > > The notification happens through a 32bit epoch value that changes every > > > time cached entropy is no longer valid, hence PRNGs need to reseed. User > > > space applications can get hold of a pointer to this value through > > > /dev/(u)random. We introduce a new ioctl() that returns an anonymous > > > file descriptor. From this file descriptor we can mmap() a single page > > > which includes the epoch at offset 0. > > > > > > random.c maintains the epoch value in a global shared page. It exposes > > > a registration API for kernel subsystems that are able to notify when > > > reseeding is needed. Notifiers register with random.c and receive a > > > unique 8bit ID and a pointer to the epoch. When they need to report a > > > reseeding event they write a new epoch value which includes the > > > notifier ID in the first 8 bits and an increasing counter value in the > > > remaining 24 bits: > > > > > > RNG epoch > > > *-------------*---------------------* > > > | notifier id | epoch counter value | > > > *-------------*---------------------* > > > 8 bits 24 bits > > Why not just use 32/32 for a full 64bit value, or better yet, 2 > > different variables? Why is 32bits and packing things together here > > somehow simpler? > > We made it 32 bits so that we can read/write it atomically in all 32bit > architectures. > Do you think that's not a problem? What 32bit platforms care about this type of interface at all? thanks, greg k-h
