From 72d3e093afae79611fa38f8f2cfab9a888fe66f2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Christopher Obbard Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2020 15:30:22 +0000 Subject: um: random: Register random as hwrng-core device The UML random driver creates a dummy device under the guest, /dev/hw_random. When this file is read from the guest, the driver reads from the host machine's /dev/random, in-turn reading from the host kernel's entropy pool. This entropy pool could have been filled by a hardware random number generator or just the host kernel's internal software entropy generator. Currently the driver does not fill the guests kernel entropy pool, this requires a userspace tool running inside the guest (like rng-tools) to read from the dummy device provided by this driver, which then would fill the guest's internal entropy pool. This all seems quite pointless when we are already reading from an entropy pool, so this patch aims to register the device as a hwrng device using the hwrng-core framework. This not only improves and cleans up the driver, but also fills the guest's entropy pool without having to resort to using extra userspace tools in the guest. This is typically a nuisance when booting a guest: the random pool takes a long time (~200s) to build up enough entropy since the dummy hwrng is not used to fill the guest's pool. This port was originally attempted by Alexander Neville "dark" (in CC, discussion in Link), but the conversation there stalled since the handling of -EAGAIN errors were no removed and longer handled by the driver. This patch attempts to use the existing method of error handling but utilises the new hwrng core. The issue can be noticed when booting a UML guest: [ 2.560000] random: fast init done [ 214.000000] random: crng init done With the patch applied, filling the pool becomes a lot quicker: [ 2.560000] random: fast init done [ 12.000000] random: crng init done Cc: Alexander Neville Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190828204609.02a7ff70@TheDarkness/ Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190829135001.6a5ff940@TheDarkness.local/ Cc: Sjoerd Simons Signed-off-by: Christopher Obbard Acked-by: Anton Ivanov Signed-off-by: Richard Weinberger --- drivers/char/hw_random/Kconfig | 16 ++++++++-------- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) (limited to 'drivers') diff --git a/drivers/char/hw_random/Kconfig b/drivers/char/hw_random/Kconfig index e92c4d9469d8..5952210526aa 100644 --- a/drivers/char/hw_random/Kconfig +++ b/drivers/char/hw_random/Kconfig @@ -540,15 +540,15 @@ endif # HW_RANDOM config UML_RANDOM depends on UML - tristate "Hardware random number generator" + select HW_RANDOM + tristate "UML Random Number Generator support" help This option enables UML's "hardware" random number generator. It attaches itself to the host's /dev/random, supplying as much entropy as the host has, rather than the small amount the UML gets from its - own drivers. It registers itself as a standard hardware random number - generator, major 10, minor 183, and the canonical device name is - /dev/hwrng. - The way to make use of this is to install the rng-tools package - (check your distro, or download from - http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkernel/). rngd periodically reads - /dev/hwrng and injects the entropy into /dev/random. + own drivers. It registers itself as a rng-core driver thus providing + a device which is usually called /dev/hwrng. This hardware random + number generator does feed into the kernel's random number generator + entropy pool. + + If unsure, say Y. -- cgit v1.2.3-58-ga151