Re: [PATCH v2] arc4random: simplify design for better safety

[Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>]

* Jason A. Donenfeld:

> +      pfd.fd = TEMP_FAILURE_RETRY (
> +	  __open64_nocancel ("/dev/random", O_RDONLY | O_CLOEXEC | O_NOCTTY));
> +      if (pfd.fd < 0)
> +	arc4random_getrandom_failure ();
> +      if (__poll (&pfd, 1, -1) < 0)
> +	arc4random_getrandom_failure ();
> +      if (__close_nocancel (pfd.fd) < 0)
> +	arc4random_getrandom_failure ();

What happens if /dev/random is actually /dev/urandom?  Will the poll
call fail?

I think we need a no-cancel variant of poll here, and we also need to
handle EINTR gracefully.

Performance-wise, my 1000 element shuffle benchmark runs about 14 times
slower without userspace buffering.  (For comparison, just removing
ChaCha20 while keeping a 256-byte buffer makes it run roughly 25% slower
than current master.)  Our random() implementation is quite slow, so
arc4random() as a replacement call is competitive.  The unbuffered
version, not so much.

Running the benchmark, I see 40% of the time spent in chacha_permute in
the kernel, that is really quite odd.  Why doesn't the system call
overhead dominate?

Thanks,
Florian