Re: [PATCH] tpm: Add module parameter for hwrng quality.

Louis Collard
2018-07-04T06:54:24Z

On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 9:03 PM, David R. Bild <david.bild@xaptum.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 1:11 AM, Louis Collard
> <louiscollard@chromium.org> wrote:
>>
>> On some systems we have seen large delays in boot time, due to
>> blocking on a call to getrandom() before the entropy pool has been
>> initialized. On these systems the usual sources of entropy are not
>> sufficient to initialize the pool in any kind of reasonable time -
>> delays of minutes have been observed; the most common workaround is to
>> mash the keyboard for a bit ;)
>>
>> Setting a non-zero quality score causes the hwrng to be used as a
>> source of entropy for the pool, the pool is therefore initialized
>> early during boot, and no delay is observed.
>>
>
> We have the same issue on our embedded devices and thus carry patches
> in our tree that set the quality. This would be a welcome change.

Glad to hear this!

>
> As a point of clarification (and correct me if I'm wrong), the TPM is
> always ready used to seed the rng. It just doesn't update the entropy
> pool estimate.

Good point.

>
> So, perhaps the default value for the TPM hwrng quality should be
> non-zero (in addition to the module param that lets users override
> it)?

That makes sense to me, however I can imagine that some users would
prefer to not have the TPM enabled as an ongoing source of entropy by
default.

Following on from your previous point - perhaps we can just make a
small change to how the initial seeding is done: maybe we can replace
the call to crng_slow_load (via add_early_randomness and
add_device_randomness) with a call (indirectly) to crng_fast_load. (We
might also need to increase the amount of data read at this point.)

This would update crng_init_cnt and crng_init, and calls to getrandom
[without GRND_RANDOM] would not block.

This obviously doesn't solve the issue if there are blocking calls on
boot that are querying random rather than urandom; I don't believe
that would be a problem for our use case though.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Louis