When trying to clean up by moving rng-tools from oe-core to meta-oe, it became clear that we don't have a way to confirm that the entropy pool has sufficient sources of randomness to avoid having getrandom() block for "too long". This can be a problem, especially at boot time. rng-tools was brought back into oe-core with the following log: > Revert this commit since: > > - some systems using oe-core master may still be using kernels from > before 5.6 pulled in the rng-tools algorithm, and > > - some hardware platforms may not have a hardware random number generator > and could therefore need to run rngd to avoid long boot-time initialization > due to a depleted entropy pool. and this comment from me: The additional context that doesn't belong in the commit log is that we talked about this change in the YP bug review meeting and decided that we would keep rng-tools in oe-core for 5.0-M2 for the two reasons given above. If we end up adding a test, as described below, we may never move the recipe to meta-oe. It seems to me that we need a test that checks if the entropy pool size ever falls below a critical threshold for "too long" in the first N seconds of boot time. Getting that test written so that: - qemu VMs and - real HW with and without /dev/hwrng all pass without the test being too permissive may take some time. Related email threads: https://lists.openembedded.org/g/openembedded-core/message/193798 https://lists.openembedded.org/g/openembedded-core/message/193994 Also should we document the test or how we recommend that people test their hardware?
Scott, will you be able to own this bug and add the test.
Bulk move to 5.2-M3.