linux-kernel - Re: Updated scalable urandom patchkit

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Message-ID: <20151011043546.19633.qmail@ns.horizon.com>
Date:	11 Oct 2015 00:35:46 -0400
From:	"George Spelvin" <linux@...izon.com>
To:	linux@...izon.com, tytso@....edu
Cc:	ahferroin7@...il.com, andi@...stfloor.org, jepler@...ythonic.net,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux@...musvillemoes.dk
Subject: Re: Updated scalable urandom patchkit

Damn, I bow before the master.  That is a much neater solution
than mine; I had assumed a lock was required for writing.

While it's good enough for benchmarking, there are a few leftover
problems I mention so they don't get missed.

One is the final write back of add_ptr on the last line of
_mix_pool_bytes.  It actually writes i, which includes the per-cpu nonce,
and will have it jumping all over without the steady progression that
the mixing polynomial assumes.

(There's a similar, lesser problem with input_rotate.)

The second, less obvious, problem is that by calling _mix_pool_bytes
completely lockless, there's the risk that it will race with and overwrite
the addition of new seed material to the pool.

The add-back is not critical, and races between two writers don't really
do any harm.  But seed entropy is valuable.

And unfortunately, transferring 256 bits (32 bytes) to the output pool
will try to write every word, so *any* concurrent add-back is risky; there's
no "safe" part of the pool that can be accessed lockless.

(The first crude hack that comes to mind is to double the size
of the output pool, without increasing its nominal capacity, and
do seeding and add-back to different halves.  Hopefully there's
something more elegant.)

Two minor suggestions about is_nonblock:
1) Rather than using (r == &nonblocking_pool), how about !r->limit?

2) Would you mind making is_nonblock bool?

   I know back before the sacred text of the prophets Kernighan and
   Ritchie was corrupted by modern heresies, we used "int" for everything,
   and we liked it.  5 miles in the snow, uphill both ways, yadda yadda.

   But I like to document range restrictions as much as possible, and "bool"
   makes it clearer to both the compiler and the reader of the code.
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