Subject: Re: IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM question...

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2009 01:27:41 -0700

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Stephen Hemminger wrote:
>> The real problem one is xen-netfront. Because 1) it is least random,
>> the attacker might be another VM 2) the VM is most in need of random
>> samples because it doesn't have real hardware.
>
> Agreed.
>
> I'm surprised Xen doesn't use virtio-rng.  I guess it needs a special 
> Xen paravirt driver for randomness. 

Yes, sampling randomness in a PV driver is pretty pointless.  We could 
do the guest end of an entropy sink entirely in usermode, but at present 
there's no dom0 support for an entropy source.

    J