[Qemu-devel] [Bug 1811758] Re: virtio-rng backend should use getentropy() syscall when available

[dkg]

To be clear, the problem with using /dev/urandom as a backend is that
it's possible to feed data from an uninitialized pool into the guest.

and the problem with using /dev/random as a backend is that it's
possible for a guest to starve the other host (and other guests) of
entropy, since it pulls from the blocking pool.

getrandom() only blocks when the CSPRNG is not initialized, otherwise it
never blocks.  this is the right behavior by default.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1811758

Title:
  virtio-rng backend should use getentropy() syscall when available

Status in QEMU:
  New

Bug description:
  According to https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/VirtIORNG the default
  backend for `virtio-rng-pci` is `/dev/random`.  Alternately, the user
  can point it to a different backend file, like `/dev/urandom`.

  However, both of these files have suboptimal behavior in one way or
  another, as documented in `random(7)`.  Instead, the default behavior
  should be to pull the requested octets from the `getrandom()` system
  call, if available, called with no flags set.

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