On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 06:10:54AM +0000, Dilger, Andreas wrote: > >With modern kernels, the /dev/random driver has the > >add_device_randomness() interface which is used to mix in > >personalization information, which includes the network MAC address. > >So that particular concern should be covered without the hack of > >mixing in cfs_rand(). > > I think that depends on the network driver. The Cray systems have some > very strange networking hardware that is beyond our control - definitely > not ethernet or Infiniband. add_device_randomness() is called from __dev_open() and dev_set_mac_address() in net/core/dev.c. This is above the ethernet and infiniband level. So as long as it looks like a Linux network device, and they are setting the hardware media access address in the standard place (dev->dev_addr), it should work fine. If they don't then they should fix their drivers to call add_device_randomness(); the answer shouldn't be to make every single users of the Linux random number generation infrastructure work around the problem at the subsystem or file system level! - Ted _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://driverdev.linuxdriverproject.org/mailman/listinfo/driverdev-devel
