Re: [PATCH v5] x86/setup: Allow passing RNG seeds via e820 setup table

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Fri Jul 01 2022 - 14:52:30 EST


On July 1, 2022 11:42:03 AM PDT, "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Hi Peter,
>
>On Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 11:25:49AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> Please correct the incredibly confusing title of this patch.
>>
>> The setup_data linked list has nothing to do with memory types (e820),
>> except that memory types is one kind of data that can be passed on by
>> this mechanism. This title makes it sound like you are passing random
>> data in as a memory type, which could make some bizarre sense if it
>> were, say, some kind of ring buffer preconfigured by the BIOS/VMM/boot
>> loader to be continually overwritten with new random data.
>
>Yea that is pretty confusing. Alright, I'll retitle that to something
>like:
>
> x86/setup: Allow passing RNG seeds via setup data
>
>Hopefully that matches more, considering the function that does the work
>is called "parse_setup_data".
>
>(I'll wait some more time before posting yet another v+1 with that
>change, in case others have more feedback.)
>
>Jason

We usually refer to it as setup_data (with the underscore) to indicate that it is a name and not a description.