Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL 5.17 16/43] random: use computational hash for entropy extraction

Theodore Ts'o
2022-03-29T15:39:15Z

On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 06:08:26PM +0000, Eric Biggers wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 07:18:00AM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> > From: "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@zx2c4.com>
> >
> > [ Upstream commit 6e8ec2552c7d13991148e551e3325a624d73fac6 ]
> >
>
> I don't think it's a good idea to start backporting random commits to random.c
> that weren't marked for stable. There were a lot of changes in v5.18, and
> sometimes they relate to each other in subtle ways, so the individual commits
> aren't necessarily safe to pick.
>
> IMO, you shouldn't backport any non-stable-Cc'ed commits to random.c unless
> Jason explicitly reviews the exact sequence of commits that you're backporting.

Especially this commit in general, which is making a fundamental
change in how we extract entropy. We should be very careful about
taking such changes into stable; a release or two of additonal "soak"
time would be a good idea before these go into the LTS releases in particular.

- Ted