Message-ID: <41E7509E.4030802@redhat.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:54:54 -0800
From: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Organization: Red Hat, Inc.
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To: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>,
       Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: short read from /dev/urandom
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The /dev/urandom device is advertised as always returning the requested 
number of bytes.  Yet, it fails to do this under some situations. 
Compile this

int main (void)
{
   alarm (100);
   char buf[32];
   int fd = open ("/dev/urandom", 0);
   while (1)
     if (read (fd, buf, sizeof buf) != sizeof (buf))
       abort ();
}

with

   gcc -o r r.c -g -O2 -pg


Note the -pg at the end to enable profiling.  Running this code fails 
for me after less than a second.

The relevant code in the kernel is this 
(drivers/char/random.c:extract_entropy)

         while (nbytes) {
                 /*
                  * Check if we need to break out or reschedule....
                  */
                 if ((flags & EXTRACT_ENTROPY_USER) && need_resched()) {
                         if (signal_pending(current)) {
                                 if (ret == 0)
                                         ret = -ERESTARTSYS;
                                 break;
                         }


Here the loop is left prematurely if a signal is pending.

One solution is to redefine the /dev/urandom interface.  The problem is 
that this will cause program to fail.  I know since I found this while 
debugging such a program.

-- 
➧ Ulrich Drepper ➧ Red Hat, Inc. ➧ 444 Castro St ➧ Mountain View, CA ❖

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