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Commit c2a7de4f authored by Jason A. Donenfeld's avatar Jason A. Donenfeld
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random: do crng pre-init loading in worker rather than irq



Taking spinlocks from IRQ context is generally problematic for
PREEMPT_RT. That is, in part, why we take trylocks instead. However, a
spin_try_lock() is also problematic since another spin_lock() invocation
can potentially PI-boost the wrong task, as the spin_try_lock() is
invoked from an IRQ-context, so the task on CPU (random task or idle) is
not the actual owner.

Additionally, by deferring the crng pre-init loading to the worker, we
can use the cryptographic hash function rather than xor, which is
perhaps a meaningful difference when considering this data has only been
through the relatively weak fast_mix() function.

The biggest downside of this approach is that the pre-init loading is
now deferred until later, which means things that need random numbers
after interrupts are enabled, but before workqueues are running -- or
before this particular worker manages to run -- are going to get into
trouble. Hopefully in the real world, this window is rather small,
especially since this code won't run until 64 interrupts had occurred.

Cc: Sultan Alsawaf <sultan@kerneltoast.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Acked-by: default avatarSebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: default avatarDominik Brodowski <linux@dominikbrodowski.net>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
parent abded93e
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