From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "hwrng: core - zeroize buffers with random data" Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2017 17:57:23 -0800 Message-ID: References: <20170208002331.29408-1-david.daney@cavium.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Cc: Linux Crypto Mailing List , Matt Mackall , Herbert Xu , Stephan Mueller , Linux Kernel Mailing List To: David Daney Return-path: Received: from mail-ot0-f195.google.com ([74.125.82.195]:33672 "EHLO mail-ot0-f195.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751059AbdBIB5l (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Feb 2017 20:57:41 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20170208002331.29408-1-david.daney@cavium.com> Sender: linux-crypto-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Stephan, Herbert? The zeroes in /dev/hwrng output are obviously complete crap, so there's something badly wrong somewhere. The locking, for example, is completely buggered. There's even a comment about it, but that comment makes the correct observation of "but y'know: randomness". But the memset() also being outside the lock makes a complete joke of the whole thing. Is the hwrng thing even worth maintaining? Compared to something like /dev/urandom, it clearly does not do a very good job. So I'm inclined to take the revert, but I'm also somewhat inclined to simply mark this crud broken when we have other things that clearly do a lot better. Linus On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 4:23 PM, David Daney wrote: > This reverts commit 2cc751545854d7bd7eedf4d7e377bb52e176cd07.