forwarding to lkml, not sure how many people read b43-dev... Hi,
while playing around with this BCM4306 (b43) wifi NIC (and reporting some lockdep issues, [0]), I noticed that the chip could be used as a HWRNG and driver support for this has been added years ago - great, I never knew! But when attempting to read from /dev/hwrng (b43 is loaded, interface is up & running), the device returns not random bytes, but: $ head -c 1000 /dev/hwrng | od -x 0000000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 * 0001740 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001750 I've used a custom-built 3.8-rc6 and a stock Debian 3.2.0-4, same results. I should add that this BCM4306 wifi NIC is inside an older (2005) PowerBook G4 laptop, so maybe it's a hardware fault. However, wifi is working perfectly. I found a similar thing reported _years_ ago for the OLTP project, with the following note, though I could not find the exact changeset for the fix yet: https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8089#comment:4 > Turned out OFW wasn't turning on the AES module. CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES is enabled in my case. On another box with an BCM4312 chip (and a Fedora 3.7.2-204.fc18.i686 kernel) the hwrng is working. More details, .config & lspci here: http://nerdbynature.de/bits/3.8.0-rc6/BCM4306/ http://nerdbynature.de/bits/3.8.0-rc6/BCM4312/ Any thoughts how to find out if this is a software or a hardware issue? Thanks, Christian. [0] http://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg1477153.html -- BOFH excuse #144: Too few computrons available. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
