[Fedora-xen] Re: more random device badness in 2.6.18 :(

[Michael Buesch]

On Tuesday 10 October 2006 23:50, Paul Wouters wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Michael Buesch wrote:
> 
> > > > Why should Openswan touch /dev/hw_random directly?
> > >
> > > Because using /dev/random whlie /dev/hw_random is available does not always
> > > work (eg with padlock)
> >
> > Oh, wait wait. I don't really understand your sentence.
> > Why can't you use /dev/random?
> 
> We have noticed in the past that on VIA's with the padlock, that
> /dev/random stopped working when hw_random got loaded, while we could
> get random from /dev/hw_random. So we assumed that was the design.

This would be a bug. But I have no idea on how this is possible to happen.

> If only a single process should ever touch a device, I wonder why it is
> a device visible to all of userland.

Oh, well. Why do we have /dev/hda, if touching it creates a damn mess. ;)
The device node is there so userspace can access it. Yes. You can read
random data from /dev/hw_random. No problem, really, if you are aware of,
that there is _NO_ guarantee that the data returned is _really_ random.
It may just return 0xFFFFFFFF for some broken piece of overheated (or
something else) hardware.
So the suggested way to use /dev/hw_random is to let rngd access it and
put the data back into the kernel entropy buffers after verifying it.

-- 
Greetings Michael.