e3c1c4fd9e
In 1448769c9cdb ("random: check for signal_pending() outside of
need_resched() check"), Jann pointed out that we previously were only
checking the TIF_NOTIFY_SIGNAL and TIF_SIGPENDING flags if the process
had TIF_NEED_RESCHED set, which meant in practice, super long reads to
/dev/[u]random would delay signal handling by a long time. I tried this
using the below program, and indeed I wasn't able to interrupt a
/dev/urandom read until after several megabytes had been read. The bug
he fixed has always been there, and so code that reads from /dev/urandom
without checking the return value of read() has mostly worked for a long
time, for most sizes, not just for <= 256.
Maybe it makes sense to keep that code working. The reason it was so
small prior, ignoring the fact that it didn't work anyway, was likely
because /dev/random used to block, and that could happen for pretty
large lengths of time while entropy was gathered. But now, it's just a
chacha20 call, which is extremely fast and is just operating on pure
data, without having to wait for some external event. In that sense,
/dev/[u]random is a lot more like /dev/zero.
Taking a page out of /dev/zero's read_zero() function, it always returns
at least one chunk, and then checks for signals after each chunk. Chunk
sizes there are of length PAGE_SIZE. Let's just copy the same thing for
/dev/[u]random, and check for signals and cond_resched() for every
PAGE_SIZE amount of data. This makes the behavior more consistent with
expectations, and should mitigate the impact of Jann's fix for the
age-old signal check bug.
---- test program ----
#include <unistd.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/random.h>
static unsigned char x[~0U];
static void handle(int) { }
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
pid_t pid = getpid(), child;
signal(SIGUSR1, handle);
if (!(child = fork())) {
for (;;)
kill(pid, SIGUSR1);
}
pause();
printf("interrupted after reading %zd bytes\n", getrandom(x, sizeof(x), 0));
kill(child, SIGTERM);
return 0;
}
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.