Re: [PATCH 5.10 000/163] 5.10.119-rc1 review

[Guenter Roeck]

On 5/27/22 09:59, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> On 5/27/22 08:53, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 04:14:21PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > >
> > > > This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 5.10.119 release.
> > > > There are 163 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response
> > > > to this one.  If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please
> > > > let me know.
> > >
> > > Is there some kind of back-story why we are doing massive changes to
> > > /dev/random? 5.19-rc1 is not even out, so third of those changes did
> > > not get much testing.
> >
> > Did you miss the posting on the stable list that described all of this:
> >     https://lore.kernel.org/all/YouECCoUA6eZEwKf@xxxxxxxxx/
>
> That describes _what_ is done, but not _why_ the patches needed to be
> backported to older kernels. Normally I would see those as enhancements,
> not as bug fixes. Given that we (ChromeOS) have been hit by rng related
> issues before (specifically boot stalls on some hardware), I am quite
> concerned about the possible impact of this series for stable releases.

Here is the missing information: This is required by NIST SP800-90B [1].
Without this set of changes, Linux distributions are expected to fail
FIPS validation in the future.

Guenter

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[1] https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-90b/final