Bug 64162
| Summary: | /dev/random broken /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail always 0 kernel-2.4.9-31 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Retired] Red Hat Linux | Reporter: | Jerry Williams <sa84120> |
| Component: | kernel | Assignee: | Arjan van de Ven <arjanv> |
| Status: | CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | medium | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | medium | ||
| Version: | 7.2 | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | i686 | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 2004-09-30 15:39:32 UTC | Type: | --- |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
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Description
Jerry Williams
2002-04-26 21:59:12 UTC
It turns out the entropy is only collected by the console mouse and keyboard. If there are others I would like to know what they are. So until someone moves the mouse or touches the keyboard there is nothing in /dev/random to be used. Most of the time I am not at the console, but since I was changing what kernel I was using I was at the console and figured this out. So don't try and run rndc-confgen if you aren't at the console ;-). So I am not sure if this is still a bug or not. SCSI and IDE io also generates entropy. Network IO doesn't (the theory is that that's an outside controlled source)... Some chipsets (intel i8xx and newer AMD ones) have an on board RNG, as do hardware SSL accelerators usually. Well I tried to do some IO and it doesn't seem to do anything. All of the machines that I have a problem with are SCSI. I did a dd if=/dev/cciss/c0d0p14 of=/dev/null bs=32k this is like a 9Gig partion and cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail still returns 0. So maybe there is a problem with the SCSI code. $ lsmod Module Size Used by Tainted: PF autofs 11556 0 (autoclean) (unused) cpqhealth 670444 0 cpqrom 23076 0 [cpqhealth] eepro100 17680 1 st 26324 0 (unused) usb-ohci 19872 0 (unused) usbcore 51808 1 [usb-ohci] ext3 62624 11 jbd 41092 11 [ext3] aic7xxx 114624 0 (unused) cciss 38528 12 sd_mod 11900 0 (unused) scsi_mod 98584 3 [st aic7xxx cciss sd_mod] [root@dhcp9 root]# lsmod Module Size Used by Not tainted loop 9168 0 (unused) autofs 11556 0 (autoclean) (unused) eepro100 17680 1 ext3 62624 6 jbd 41092 6 [ext3] cpqarray 19808 7 sd_mod 11900 0 (unused) scsi_mod 98584 1 [sd_mod] root@ns3:/root # lsmod Module Size Used by Not tainted autofs 11556 0 (autoclean) (unused) eepro100 17680 1 ext3 62624 6 jbd 41092 6 [ext3] cpqarray 19808 7 sym53c8xx 57988 0 (unused) sd_mod 11900 0 (unused) scsi_mod 98584 2 [sym53c8xx sd_mod] Ah ha! but cciss is not scsi (well it doesn't use the kernel scsi layer, of course you can connect scsi disks to it) This is a lie >I have gone back to kernel-2.4.7-10 and it works ok.< What happened was I was on the console when I did this. So I created entropy from the keyboard. If I boot to 2.4.7-10 without using the console, cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail is 0. So I would say that there is a SCSI or Compaq problem with all 7.2 i686 kernels as far as entropy goes. please also here here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=118921 Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/ |