Bug#997954: linux: Missing HW RNG on Pine64 on bullseye and bookworm
Source: linux
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
Installing bullseye or bookworm on a Pine64 [0] results in a
system with very low entropy. After some light usage over the
serial console I see:
```
cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail
3
```
This device has a hardware RNG which could be used with rng-tools [1]
to increase entropy but the kernel configuration has it disabled.
Could the `CRYPTO_DEV_SUN8I_CE_PRNG` option be enabled? Then all
users of the A64 SOC could have access to more entropy. A practical
imediate impact is that boot times will decrease for users of
systemd since the systemd-random-seed.service [2] will be able
to gather entropy much faster. Currently on a Pine64
`systemd-analyze blame` shows the random seed service taking 3
seconds on boot.
[0]: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/PINE64/PINEA64
[1]: https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/rng-tools5
[2]: https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/systemd/systemd-random-seed.service.8.en.html
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-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.1
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-9-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU thread)
Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
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