diff mbox series

[v6,10/17] arm: use fallback for random_get_entropy() instead of zero

Message ID 20220423212623.1957011-11-Jason@zx2c4.com
State New
Headers show
Series archs/random: fallback to best raw ktime when no cycle counter | expand

Commit Message

Jason A. Donenfeld April 23, 2022, 9:26 p.m. UTC
In the event that random_get_entropy() can't access a cycle counter or
similar, falling back to returning 0 is really not the best we can do.
Instead, at least calling random_get_entropy_fallback() would be
preferable, because that always needs to return _something_, even
falling back to jiffies eventually. It's not as though
random_get_entropy_fallback() is super high precision or guaranteed to
be entropic, but basically anything that's not zero all the time is
better than returning zero all the time.

Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Russell King <linux@armlinux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
---
 arch/arm/include/asm/timex.h | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Comments

Russell King (Oracle) April 25, 2022, 2:30 p.m. UTC | #1
On Sat, Apr 23, 2022 at 11:26:16PM +0200, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> In the event that random_get_entropy() can't access a cycle counter or
> similar, falling back to returning 0 is really not the best we can do.
> Instead, at least calling random_get_entropy_fallback() would be
> preferable, because that always needs to return _something_, even
> falling back to jiffies eventually. It's not as though
> random_get_entropy_fallback() is super high precision or guaranteed to
> be entropic, but basically anything that's not zero all the time is
> better than returning zero all the time.
> 
> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
> Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
> Cc: Russell King <linux@armlinux.org.uk>

Reviewed-by: Russell King (Oracle) <rmk+kernel@armlinux.org.uk>

Thanks.
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/arch/arm/include/asm/timex.h b/arch/arm/include/asm/timex.h
index 7c3b3671d6c2..6d1337c169cd 100644
--- a/arch/arm/include/asm/timex.h
+++ b/arch/arm/include/asm/timex.h
@@ -11,5 +11,6 @@ 
 
 typedef unsigned long cycles_t;
 #define get_cycles()	({ cycles_t c; read_current_timer(&c) ? 0 : c; })
+#define random_get_entropy() (((unsigned long)get_cycles()) ?: random_get_entropy_fallback())
 
 #endif