Bug#914511: Please enable the "virtio-rng" driver in "cloud" kernels

[Cédric Dufour]

Workaround: have the hypervisor expose the 'rdrand' CPU feature to the VM

(but this is in the hands of the hypervisor's provider, not the VM user)

Bug#914511: Please enable the "virtio-rng" driver in "cloud" kernels

[Cédric Dufour]

Now that *u*random is blocking until considered properly initialized, 
the entropy starvation [1] issue becomes a real problem during the boot 
process; e.g. it takes several minutes until one gets SSH access to the box.


[1] 
https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#entropy-starvation


--
Cédric Dufour - Exoscale (Lausanne, Switzerland)

Bug#914511: Please enable the "virtio-rng" driver in "cloud" kernels

[Martijn van de Streek]

Package: linux-image-cloud-amd64
Version: 4.18+99

The "HW_RANDOM_VIRTIO" configuration setting is not currently enabled in
the "cloud" flavour of kernel images.

KVM virtual machines set up by virt-manager (and possibly virt-install,
I'm not sure) come with a virtual random device like that by default,
and would benefit from the driver being available if they need a lot of
randomness.