Bug 134225

Summary: [libexec] [patch] Reduce disk write load from save-entropy
Product: Base System Reporter: Peter Jeremy <peter>
Component: kernAssignee: Xin LI <delphij>
Status: Closed FIXED    
Severity: Affects Only Me CC: delphij, peter
Priority: Normal    
Version: 8.0-CURRENT   
Hardware: Any   
OS: Any   
Attachments:
Description Flags
file.diff none

Description Peter Jeremy 2009-05-05 08:30:01 UTC 
	By default, save-entropy is run by cron every 11 minutes to
	provide some initial entropy following a system reboot.  It
	uses the standard log-rotating approach to maintain 8 entropy
	files, with the most recent always being saved-entropy.1
	suffix and the oldest file being deleted.  As a result, each
	run of save-entropy causes 7 file renames, 1 file create &
	write and 1 file delete.

	There does not appear to be any special reason for keeping the
	most recent entropy dump in a fixed name - the order of
	reloading the entropy files should not affect the total amount
	of entropy loaded into the kernel.  In order to reduce the
	number of writes to the SSD in my laptop, I therefore
	re-engineered save-entropy to just overwrite the oldest file
	in-place.  This means that only the 2KB of entropy and 1 inode
	are touched.  In particular, by not deleting/recreating the
	file, $entropy_dir is not touched.

How-To-Repeat: 	Code inspection.  Monitoring disk write transfers via devstat.
Comment 1 Eitan Adler freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2012-03-25 04:33:03 UTC 
Responsible Changed
From-To: freebsd-bugs->eadler

take - and reminder to get secteam review of my final patch
Comment 2 Eitan Adler freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2012-09-02 18:05:38 UTC 
Responsible Changed
From-To: eadler->freebsd-bugs

I won't be looking at this PR for a while and I need to clear some out 
of my queue
Comment 3 Doug Barton freebsd_committer 2012-09-04 23:24:54 UTC 
State Changed
From-To: open->analyzed


Interesting idea, I'll look at a variation of it shortly.
Comment 4 Doug Barton freebsd_committer 2012-09-04 23:24:54 UTC 
Responsible Changed
From-To: freebsd-bugs->dougb


My script.
Comment 5 Doug Barton freebsd_committer 2012-09-24 05:49:51 UTC 
FWIW, part of the reason for rotation is to use different/newer files
first on a subsequent boot where uptime was not long enough to replace
all the files. However, I'd like to see that issue addressed by
pseudo-randomizing the order in which the files in /var/db/entropy are
used by rc.d/random, so once that is done this type of change should be
both safe and desirable.

Other considerations, make sure that there are at least
$entropy_save_num files with >0 size before replacing one of them. (So
that if 1 or more files are accidentally deleted, you are still adding
to the total number of files.) The same pre-processing loop could test
that, and test what the oldest file is.

Doug
Comment 6 Doug Barton freebsd_committer 2012-10-08 09:26:46 UTC 
Responsible Changed
From-To: dougb->freebsd-bugs


Back into the pool
Comment 7 Eitan Adler freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2018-05-28 19:48:17 UTC 
batch change:

For bugs that match the following
-  Status Is In progress 
AND
- Untouched since 2018-01-01.
AND
- Affects Base System OR Documentation

DO:

Reset to open status.


Note:
I did a quick pass but if you are getting this email it might be worthwhile to double check to see if this bug ought to be closed.
Comment 8 Xin LI freebsd_committer 2019-11-30 19:33:42 UTC 
Proposed patch https://reviews.freebsd.org/D22612
Comment 9 commit-hook freebsd_committer 2019-11-30 20:07:40 UTC 
A commit references this bug:

Author: delphij
Date: Sat Nov 30 20:06:53 UTC 2019
New revision: 355247
URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/355247

Log:
  Reduce disk write load in /usr/libexec/save-entropy.

  Before this commit, the save-entropy script rotates entropy files
  like logs. This involves creating a new file that holds the entropy
  and renaming of all existing entropy files. However, the entropy
  data do not really need to be kept in a particular order, and
  replacing the oldest file is sufficient.

  This commit replaces the rotation with a scan in the
  [1..entropy_save_num] space that finds the first empty slot, or
  the slot of the oldest file, and writes entropy into that slot.

  This also fixes an issue that prevents save-entropy from saving
  any entropy when there is one non-regular file in any slot as a
  side effect.

  Based on an earlier patch from peterj@.

  PR:		134225
  Reported by:	peterj
  Reviewed by:	csprng (cem, markm)
  MFC after:	2 weeks
  Differential Revision:	https://reviews.freebsd.org/D22612

Changes:
  head/libexec/save-entropy/save-entropy.sh