svn commit: r274739 - head/sys/mips/conf

[Ian Lepore]

On Fri, 2014-11-21 at 01:22 -0800, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> Mark Murray wrote this message on Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 08:25 +0000:
> > 
> > > On 20 Nov 2014, at 08:48, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Should we make random standard now?  We don't live in the 90's anymore,
> > > and a system really can't function w/o randomness anymore???
> > 
> > There is a case to be made for making it default in all/most kernel
> > configs.
> > 
> > I disagree on making it compulsory in all cases, as very small embedded
> > systems can easily argue for not having it.
> 
> How will it talk w/ the out side world?  w/o random, No sshd, no
> https...  providing randomness is a core component of a modern OS...
> 
> If you're really going for small embeded, you don't want FreeBSD, or
> if you do, you're willing to do the work to manually rip a lot more
> out of the standard kernel than just the random driver...  My stripped
> down i386 kernel is still over 6MB in size...
> 
> > > I'm fine w/ making the various random mixers options, but the core
> > > random infrastructure and /dev/u?random should be standard now???
> > 
> > There is some compulsory infrastructure; this gets you the ???dummy???
> > driver which just blocks and never delivers anything.
> 
> Plus, you'd need to turn off the entropy boot script among other
> things...
> 
> If you can demonstrate a usable system w/o much modifications that
> runs w/ the dummy interface, or no boot random, that I'll drop my
> suggestion...  I'll try removing random tomorrow and see what breaks...
> 

If your point is that after the recent commits you can no longer do
these things, then I guess that's kind of hard to argue with given that
some of us have been trying to say for a couple years that if 
/dev/random starts blocking to wait for entropy at startup, existing
*functional* small systems will stop working.

Before those changes everything worked fine on the 90mhz 64MB arm
systems we build products around, which have no more than a few bits of
entropy available during the boot process, and which (I'll say it again
even though nobody has ever paid any attention to it) don't actually
need any entropy to come up and do what it is they are designed to do.

They don't use https (a few of them don't even have network
connections).  They use ssh for its convenience (it's better than
telnet), but NOT for security.  (And really, whether that makes sense to
you or not, "the system must be secure" is not your decision to make.)

I haven't tested a recent -current on those small systems, but we've
already resigned ourselves to sticking with 8.x for those older boards
just because the tide of bloat (both code and policy) is too much to
swim against.

-- Ian