Jivin Jeff Garzik lays it down ...
Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:
On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 14:27 +1000, David McCullough wrote:
Hi all,
Here is a small patch for 2.6.11 that adds a routine:
add_true_randomness(__u32 *buf, int nwords);
so that true random number generator device drivers can add a entropy to the system. Drivers that use this can be found in the latest release of ocf-linux, an asynchronous crypto implementation for linux based on the *BSD Cryptographic Framework.
http://ocf-linux.sourceforge.net/
Adding this can dramatically improve the performance of /dev/random on small embedded systems which do not generate much entropy.
People will not apply any kind of such changes.
Both OCF and acrypto already handle all RNG cases - no need for any kind
of userspace daemon or entropy (re)injection mechanism.
Anyone who want to use HW randomness may use OCF/acrypto mechanism.
For example here is patch to enable acrypto support for hw_random.c
It is very simple and support only upto 4 bytes request, of course it
is not interested for anyone, but it is only 2-minutes example:
If you want to add entropy to the kernel entropy pool from hardware RNG, you should use the userland daemon, which detects non-random (broken) hardware and provides throttling, so that RNG data collection does not consume 100% CPU.
If you want to use the hardware RNG directly, it's simple: just open /dev/hw_random.
Hardware RNG should not go kernel->kernel without adding FIPS tests and such.
For reference, the RNG on the Safenet I am using this with is FIPS140 certified. I believe the HIFN part is also but I place the doc that says so.
FIPS certification is not relevant to the discussion.
I am talking about active testing of -all data- that is produced by an RNG, before making use of it. Please read the source code of rngd.
Jeff
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