Re: Linux messages full of `random: get_random_u32 called from`

[Justin Forbes]

On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 5:25 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 10:49:34AM -0700, Laura Abbott wrote:
>>
>> It is a Fedora patch we're carrying
>> https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/libgcrypt/blob/master/f/libgcrypt-1.6.2-fips-ctor.patch#_23
>> so yes, it is a Fedora specific use case.
>> From talking to the libgcrypt team, this is a FIPS mode requirement
>> to run power on self test at the library constructor and the self
>> test of libgrcypt ends up requiring a fully seeded RNG. Citation
>> is in section 9.10 of
>> https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/Cryptographic-Module-Validation-Program/documents/fips140-2/FIPS1402IG.pdf
>
> Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but does Fedora need FIPS
> compliance?  Or is this something which is only required for RHEL?
>
> ("Here's to FIPS: the cause of, and solution to, all of Life's
> problems."  :-)
>
One of the advantages of carrying such things in Fedora is we find
these problems before RHEL does and hopefully there is a solution in
place before they ever even see it.

>From the rawhide end, I just brought in virtio-rng as inline vs
module, this works around the issue for lots of users, but not all.
GCE is still impacted, and a user came to complain about it already
last night.  And of course any other virt platform without virtio-rng,
or some hardware. Most hardware installs don't have dracut-fips so
they will boot, eventually.

Justin