Re: [PATCH 1/2] add helper for highmem checks

H. Peter Anvin
2013-02-11T19:44:51Z

Oh, craptastic. X used to hash /dev/mem to get a random seed. It should have stopped that long ago, and used /dev/[u]random.

Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> wrote:

>On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 09:32:41AM -0800, Dave Hansen wrote:
>> That's crazy. Didn't expect that at all.
>>
>> I guess X is happier getting an error than getting random pages back.
>
>Yeah, I think this is something special only this window manager wdm
>does. The line below has appeared repeatedly in the logs earlier:
>
>Feb 5 23:02:02 a1 wdm: Cannot read randomFile "/dev/mem", errno = 14
>
>This happens when wdm starts so I'm going to guess it uses it for
>something funny, "randomFile" it calls it??
>
>With the WARN_ON check added and booting 3.8-rc6, it would choke wdm
>somehow and it wouldn't start properly so that even the error out above
>doesn't happen. Oh well ...
>
>> I'm working on a set of patches now that should get it _working_
>> instead of just returning an error.
>
>Yeah, send them on and I'll run them.
>
>Thanks.

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