Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v4] ppc/spapr: Implement H_RANDOM hypercall in QEMU

[Greg Kurz]

On Mon, 21 Sep 2015 12:10:00 +1000
David Gibson <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 11:05:52AM +0200, Greg Kurz wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Sep 2015 10:49:41 +0200
> > Thomas Huth <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > > The PAPR interface defines a hypercall to pass high-quality
> > > hardware generated random numbers to guests. Recent kernels can
> > > already provide this hypercall to the guest if the right hardware
> > > random number generator is available. But in case the user wants
> > > to use another source like EGD, or QEMU is running with an older
> > > kernel, we should also have this call in QEMU, so that guests that
> > > do not support virtio-rng yet can get good random numbers, too.
> > > 
> > > This patch now adds a new pseudo-device to QEMU that either
> > > directly provides this hypercall to the guest or is able to
> > > enable the in-kernel hypercall if available. The in-kernel
> > > hypercall can be enabled with the use-kvm property, e.g.:
> > > 
> > >  qemu-system-ppc64 -device spapr-rng,use-kvm=true
> > > 
> > > For handling the hypercall in QEMU instead, a "RngBackend" is
> > > required since the hypercall should provide "good" random data
> > > instead of pseudo-random (like from a "simple" library function
> > > like rand() or g_random_int()). Since there are multiple RngBackends
> > > available, the user must select an appropriate back-end via the
> > > "rng" property of the device, e.g.:
> > > 
> > >  qemu-system-ppc64 -object rng-random,filename=/dev/hwrng,id=gid0 \
> > >                    -device spapr-rng,rng=gid0 ...
> > > 
> > > See http://wiki.qemu-project.org/Features-Done/VirtIORNG for
> > > other example of specifying RngBackends.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <address@hidden>
> > > ---
> > 
> > It is a good thing that the user can choose between in-kernel and backend,
> > and this patch does the work.
> > 
> > This being said, I am not sure about the use case where a user has a hwrng
> > capable platform and wants to run guests without any hwrng support at all is
> > an appropriate default behavior... I guess we will find more users that want
> > in-kernel being the default if it is available.
> > 
> > The patch below modifies yours to do just this: the pseudo-device is only
> > created if hwrng is present and not already created.
> 
> I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I agree that it
> would be nice to allow H_RANDOM support by default.  On the other hand
> the patch below leaves no way to turn it off for testing purposes.  It

This could be handled with a new spapr property, say 'use-hwrng', defaulting
to true.

> also adds another place where the guest hardware depends on the host
> configuration, which adds to the already substantial mess of ensuring
> that source and destination hardware configuration matches for
> migration.
> 

Yeah, describing the guest hw is really essential for migration... this
is best addressed at the libvirt level with a full XML description of
the machine... but FWIW if we are talking about running pseries on a
POWER8 or newer host, I am not aware about "hwrng-less" boards... but
I am probably missing something :)

Back to Thomas' patch, it does the job and brings H_RANDOM, which is
currently missing.

Acked-by: Greg Kurz <address@hidden>

I could test both use-kvm and backend flavors (including migration).

Tested-by: Greg Kurz <address@hidden>

Thanks.

--
Greg

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