On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 03:40:50AM +0200, Ahmed S. Darwish wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 09:29:55AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 14, 2019 at 11:51 PM Lennart Poettering
> > <mzxreary@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > Oh man. Just spend 5min to understand the situation, before claiming
> > > this was garbage or that was garbage. The code above does not block
> > > boot.
> >
> > Yes it does. You clearly didn't read the thread.
> >
> > > It blocks startup of services that explicit order themselves
> > > after the code above. There's only a few services that should do that,
> > > and the main system boots up just fine without waiting for this.
> >
> > That's a nice theory, but it doesn't actually match reality.
> >
> > There are clearly broken setups that use this for things that it
> > really shouldn't be used for. Asking for true randomness at boot
> > before there is any indication that randomness exists, and then just
> > blocking with no further action that could actually _generate_ said
> > randomness.
> >
> > If your description was true that the system would come up and be
> > usable while the blocked thread is waiting for that to happen, things
> > would be fine.
> >
>
> A small note here, especially after I've just read the commit log of
> 72dbcf721566 ('Revert ext4: "make __ext4_get_inode_loc plug"'), which
> unfairly blames systemd there.
>
> Yes, the systemd-random-seed(8) process blocks, but this is an
> isolated process, and it's only there as a synchronization point and
> to load/restore random seeds from disk across reboots.
>
> The wisdom of having a sysnchronization service ("before/after urandom
> CRNG is inited") can be debated. That service though, and systemd in
> general, did _not_ block the overall system boot.
>
> What blocked the system boot was GDM/gnome-session implicitly calling
> getrandom() for the Xorg MIT cookie. This was shown in the strace log
> below:
>
> https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190910173243.GA3992@darwi-home-pc
>
So did systemd-random-seed instead drain what little entropy there was
before GDM started, increasing the likelihood a subsequent getrandom()
call would block?
Regards,
Vito Caputo
