[coreboot] Asus Chromebox Panther: no HW RNG?

[Angel Pons]

Hello,

On Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 08:50 Grant Grundler <grantgrundler at gmail.com wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 1:51 AM Ivan Ivanov <qmastery16 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry but I think that relying on Intel RNG is a _Terrible_ idea
> > regarding the security and not sure you should be pursuing it.
>
> What I'm pursueing is a reasonable initialization time so
> wpa_supplicant can start. 555 seconds is not reasonable:
> [  555.496678] random: crng init done
> [  555.496678] random: crng init done
> [  555.496684] random: 7 urandom warning(s) missed due to ratelimiting
> [  560.265385] wlp2s0: authenticate with xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
> [  560.279395] wlp2s0: send auth to xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1/3)
> [  560.281981] wlp2s0: authenticated
>
> intel-crng was proposed elsewhere as one solution to this problem but
> it's clear to me now that this is not an option with the panther
> chromebox.
>
> I don't recall seeing this with older kernels (have been running
> debian on this HW since early 4.x releases) and will look at the
> driver git logs.
>
> I was hoping someone in the Coreboot community would have some idea
> why random driver isn't getting enough entropy and if coreboot isn't
> advertising something that helps with the random crng initialization.
>
> I experimented with attaching just an optical mouse and that didn't
> seem to help.
> Attaching a keyboard and just hitting <shift> key did seem to help
> ("crng init done" in about 10 seconds). I'm assuming the /dev/random
> driver is not seeing enough actiivity otherwise.
>

I have observed the same behavior on Debian Sid, I would have to smash my
keyboard a few times to generate enough entropy. I don't see anything
similar with Arch Linux. Maybe it has to do with distro-specific packaging?
I haven't checked.

cheers,
> grant
>

Best regards,
Angel Pons

>
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