From d47579fb283ada92ca83eea1ed22dda19883b483 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Jason A. Donenfeld" Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2021 17:50:52 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] random: avoid superfluous call to RDRAND in CRNG extraction commit 2ee25b6968b1b3c66ffa408de23d023c1bce81cf upstream. RDRAND is not fast. RDRAND is actually quite slow. We've known this for a while, which is why functions like get_random_u{32,64} were converted to use batching of our ChaCha-based CRNG instead. Yet CRNG extraction still includes a call to RDRAND, in the hot path of every call to get_random_bytes(), /dev/urandom, and getrandom(2). This call to RDRAND here seems quite superfluous. CRNG is already extracting things based on a 256-bit key, based on good entropy, which is then reseeded periodically, updated, backtrack-mutated, and so forth. The CRNG extraction construction is something that we're already relying on to be secure and solid. If it's not, that's a serious problem, and it's unlikely that mixing in a measly 32 bits from RDRAND is going to alleviate things. And in the case where the CRNG doesn't have enough entropy yet, we're already initializing the ChaCha key row with RDRAND in crng_init_try_arch_early(). Removing the call to RDRAND improves performance on an i7-11850H by 370%. In other words, the vast majority of the work done by extract_crng() prior to this commit was devoted to fetching 32 bits of RDRAND. Reviewed-by: Theodore Ts'o Acked-by: Ard Biesheuvel Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman --- drivers/char/random.c | 4 +--- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/drivers/char/random.c b/drivers/char/random.c index 2ecfcf9..8f5e040 100644 --- a/drivers/char/random.c +++ b/drivers/char/random.c @@ -1023,7 +1023,7 @@ static void crng_reseed(struct crng_state *crng, struct entropy_store *r) static void _extract_crng(struct crng_state *crng, __u8 out[CHACHA_BLOCK_SIZE]) { - unsigned long v, flags, init_time; + unsigned long flags, init_time; if (crng_ready()) { init_time = READ_ONCE(crng->init_time); @@ -1033,8 +1033,6 @@ static void _extract_crng(struct crng_state *crng, &input_pool : NULL); } spin_lock_irqsave(&crng->lock, flags); - if (arch_get_random_long(&v)) - crng->state[14] ^= v; chacha20_block(&crng->state[0], out); if (crng->state[12] == 0) crng->state[13]++; -- 2.7.4