Re: [PATCH v3 0/4] enable early printing of hashed pointers

[Tobin C. Harding]

On Thu, May 03, 2018 at 10:23:49PM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, May 04, 2018 at 09:07:37AM +1000, Tobin C. Harding wrote:
> > Currently if an attempt is made to print a pointer before there is
> > enough entropy then '(____ptrval____)' is printed.  This makes debugging
> > stack traces during early boot difficult.
> > 
> > It was observed that we can relax the requirement for cryptographically
> > secure hashing when debugging while still maintaining pointer hashing
> > behaviour.  This allows kernels to be debugged without developers
> > relying on different pointer printing behavior.
> > 
> > Using the hw RNG if available solves this problem for those machines
> > that have a hardware RNG, we would like to solve it for _all_ machines.
> > 
> > Patch 1 - Whitespace fixes.
> > Patch 2 - Fix get_random_bytes_arch()
> > Patch 3 - Use hw RNG for pointer hashing if available (by default).
> > Patch 4 - Use insecure hashing with command line option 'debug_early_boot'.
> 
> What tree are these patches going in?  It seems to be equally split
> between random and core kernel code.  I'm happy taking it in via the
> random tree, or if it goes in some other patch (I've already ack'ed
> the random changes).  I just want to make sure other folks aren't
> assuming I was going take the patches, while I was assuming it would
> go to Linus some other way.

Thanks for verifying this Ted, I was wondering the same thing.  Perhaps
this set should be split up, patch 4 is not related to the first three.
Assuming no comments come in over the next few days it looks like people
are ok with the first 3 patches, perhaps you could take those through
your tree (I can resend separately if easier for you).  I could then
re-spin the final patch a few more times and perhaps Andrew would take
it through his tree?

Feel free to violently correct me, I'm still learning the ins-and-outs
of the patch pathway to Linus.

thanks,
Tobin.