Bill Davidsen wrote:
Herbert Xu wrote:
You missed the point. This has nothing to do with the crypto API.
Jeff is saying that if this is disabled by default, then only a few
users will enable it and therefore use this API.
Since we can't afford to enable it by default as hardware RNG may
fail which can lead to catastrophic consequences, there is no point
for this API at all.
Wait a minute, if it fails the system drops back to software, which is
not as good in a pedantic analysis, but perhaps falls a good bit short
of "catastrophic consequences" as most people would characterize that
phrase. And more to the point, now that many CPUs and chipsets are the
RNG of choice, what is the actual probability of a failure of the RNG
leaving a functional system (that's a real question seeking response
from someone who has some actual data).
As I've said, in the past the Intel RNGs in particular -have- failed,
but the rest of the system keeps on working just fine.
It probably depends on the hardware implementation; I think the Intel
RNG was based on a thermal diode, or somesuch.
In the cases where an RNG has failed in the past, the system has worked
as expected: rngd stopped feeding data into the entropy pool.
If the VIA RNG (on-CPU) fails, that's probably indicative of a larger
problem, though.
Jeff
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