Hi!

quoted

From my point of view, it would make sense to factor time from RTC and
mac addresses into the initial hash. Situation in the paper was so bad
some devices had _completely identical_ keys. We should be able to do
better than that.

We fixed that **years** ago.  In fact, the authors shared with me an
early look at that paper and I implemented add_device_entropy() over
the July 4th weekend back in 2012.  So we are indeed mixing in MAC
addresses and the hardware clock (if it is initialized that early).
In fact that was one of the first things that I did.  Note that this

Ok, thanks.

quoted

BTW... 128 interrupts... that's 1.3 seconds, right? Would it make
sense to wait two seconds if urandom use is attempted before it is
ready?

That really depends on the system.  We can't assume that people are
using systems with a 100Hz clock interrupt.  More often than not
people are using tickless kernels these days.  That's actually the
problem with changing /dev/urandom to block until things are
initialized.

Ok, let me check:

config HZ_PERIODIC
config NO_HZ_IDLE
config NO_HZ_FULL

in HZ_PERIODIC, there should be no problem.

NO_HZ_IDLE... should not be a problem either. We can easily make sure
that cpu's are not idle, something like 

     while (not_enough_entropy())
     	   schedule()

NO_HZ_FULL.... first, help text seems to imply that timer ticks still
happen when cpu is in kernel, and second, there is always one CPU that
handles timer ticks. So we are still ok.

So I believe we should add the wait to urandom. One second delay in
rare cases sounds better than alternatives.

Best regards,
									Pavel
PS: Are there systems where the timer interrupt is the only source of time?
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html