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  • H. Peter Anvin's avatar
    x86, random: Enable the RDSEED instruction · d20f78d2
    H. Peter Anvin authored
    
    
    Upcoming Intel silicon adds a new RDSEED instruction, which is similar
    to RDRAND but provides a stronger guarantee: unlike RDRAND, RDSEED
    will always reseed the PRNG from the true random number source between
    each read.  Thus, the output of RDSEED is guaranteed to be 100%
    entropic, unlike RDRAND which is only architecturally guaranteed to be
    1/512 entropic (although in practice is much more.)
    
    The RDSEED instruction takes the same time to execute as RDRAND, but
    RDSEED unlike RDRAND can legitimately return failure (CF=0) due to
    entropy exhaustion if too many threads on too many cores are hammering
    the RDSEED instruction at the same time.  Therefore, we have to be
    more conservative and only use it in places where we can tolerate
    failures.
    
    This patch introduces the primitives arch_get_random_seed_{int,long}()
    but does not use it yet.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarH. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
    Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
    Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
    Cc: Michael Ellerman <michael@ellerman.id.au>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTheodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
    d20f78d2