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From: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
To: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Amit Shah <amit.shah@redhat.com>,
	Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>,
	Andreas Faerber <afaerber@suse.de>,
	qemu-devel@nongnu.org
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/6] add paravirtualization hwrng support
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 09:45:09 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <508E4215.6050803@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <508AF2C0.30404@zytor.com>

Il 26/10/2012 22:29, H. Peter Anvin ha scritto:
>>> This is surreal.  Output from /dev/hwrng turns into output for /dev/random... it us guaranteed worse; period, end of story.
>> > 
>> > Isn't that exactly what happens in bare-metal?  hwrng -> rngd -> random.  Instead here
>> > we'd have, host hwrng -> virtio-rng-pci -> guest hwrng -> guest rngd -> guest random.
>> > 
>> > The only difference is that you paravirtualize access to the host hwrng to a) distribute
>> > entropy to multiple guests; b) support migration across hosts with different CPUs and
>> > hardware.
> First, hwrng is only one of the sources used by rngd.  It can also
> (currently) use RDRAND or TPM; additional sources are likely to be added
> in the future.
> 
> Second, the harvesting of environmental noise -- timings -- is not as
> good in a VM as on plain hardware, so for the no-hwrng case it is better
> for this to be done in the host than in the VM.

Neither of these make /dev/random with virtio-rng-pci worse than without
(as would be the case if you fed /dev/urandom).  And migration works.
This, and avoiding denial of service for the host's /dev/random, is all
I care about at this time.

There is always time to change defaults to something better.

Paolo

  reply	other threads:[~2012-10-29  8:45 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 29+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-10-26 14:43 [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/6] add paravirtualization hwrng support Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 14:43 ` [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 1/6] vl: add -object option to create QOM objects from the command line Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 14:43 ` [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/6] object: add object_property_add_bool (v2) Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 14:43 ` [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 3/6] rng: add RndBackend abstract object class Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 14:43 ` [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 4/6] rng-random: add an RNG backend that uses /dev/random Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 14:43 ` [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 5/6] rng-egd: introduce EGD compliant RNG backend Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 14:43 ` [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 6/6] virtio-rng: hardware random number generator device Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 15:08 ` [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/6] add paravirtualization hwrng support Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-26 15:42   ` Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 16:09     ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-26 18:24       ` Anthony Liguori
2012-10-26 18:26         ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-29  6:23         ` Amit Shah
2012-10-30  4:32           ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-26 18:58       ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-26 19:07         ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-26 19:51           ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-26 19:54             ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-26 20:29             ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-29  8:45               ` Paolo Bonzini [this message]
2012-10-30  4:34                 ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-30  4:43                 ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-30  9:05                   ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-30 21:11                     ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-31  7:29                       ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-31 14:15                         ` H. Peter Anvin
2012-10-31 14:27                           ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-26 18:53     ` Paolo Bonzini
2012-10-29  7:01 ` Amit Shah

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