On Tue, 19 Apr 2022, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote: > For situations in which we don't have a c0 counter register available, > we've been falling back to reading the c0 "random" register, which is > usually bounded by the amount of TLB entries and changes every other > cycle or so. This means it wraps extremely often. We can do better by > combining this fast-changing counter with a potentially slower-changing > counter from random_get_entropy_fallback() in the more significant bits. > This commit combines the two, taking into account that the changing bits > are in a different bit position depending on the CPU model. In addition, > we previously were falling back to 0 for ancient CPUs that Linux does > not support anyway; remove that dead path entirely. Tested-by: Maciej W. Rozycki <macro@xxxxxxxxxxx> I've pushed the algorithm through testing with a number of suitable systems: - an R2000A and an R3000A with no timer of any kind, only jiffies, - an R3400 with a chipset timer only, - an R4400SC with a usable buggy CP0 counter and a chipset timer, - a 5Kc with a good CP0 counter only, with no obvious issues spotted. Thank you for working on this! Maciej