Re: IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM question...

Jeremy Fitzhardinge
2009-04-07T08:28:04Z

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Stephen Hemminger wrote:
>> The real problem one is xen-netfront. Because 1) it is least random,
>> the attacker might be another VM 2) the VM is most in need of random
>> samples because it doesn't have real hardware.
>
> Agreed.
>
> I'm surprised Xen doesn't use virtio-rng. I guess it needs a special
> Xen paravirt driver for randomness.

Yes, sampling randomness in a PV driver is pretty pointless. We could
do the guest end of an entropy sink entirely in usermode, but at present
there's no dom0 support for an entropy source.

J