Christopher, You did not address my previous question as to why that patch would resolve this issue.
Am I correct in assuming that you are requesting that I reproduce these conditions in the unreleased 14.04? It should be noted, if not reflected in the bug status, that this is still a confirmed bug for 10.04 LTS and 12.04 LTS. Since the status of a bug may be different for different releases is it the case that the bug status on this ticket is just meant to reflect the state in the current development release? This is not made clear in any of the documentation I've read. For people coming across this bug report who have experienced application blocking issues due to low available entropy (usually running under some sort of virtualization) one easy solution is to install the haveged package and run that daemon. Whether that provides adequate security is open for debate, but it will prevent application hangs while waiting for sufficient entropy. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kernel Packages, which is subscribed to linux in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/575669 Title: Rapid depletion of entropy pool Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu: Incomplete Bug description: I was noticing that on several of my servers the available entropy has been exceedingly low for the last 6-7 months. My guess is this problem began with Ubuntu 9.10 and continues in Ubuntu 10.04. I came across some useful information here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/4/5/19 And I confirmed that running: watch cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail will rapidly deplete the entropy pool. But running the python script: import sys, time while True: sys.stdout.write(open('/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail', 'r').read()) time.sleep(1) will not rapidly deplete the entropy pool. This seems to support the hypothesis that entropy is being drained with each launch of a process which has been linked to the glibc randomized stack protector. Some information about that can be found here: http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2008-10/msg00006.html As many people who have run virtual servers can attest, low entropy on a server can cause a number of difficult to diagnose performance problems as processes block trying to access /dev/random. Low entropy may also lead to a reduction in security for various cryptographic services. I'm not an expert in these matters and have limited ability to test as many of my servers are running older versions but it does appear that those older versions do not have this behavior. This could also be a kernel issue but I thought I would start here and see if others can replicate this problem and help in diagnosing the issue. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/575669/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kernel-packages Post to : kernel-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kernel-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
