Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 11 Sep 2017 17:34:05 -0600
From:      Ian Lepore <ian@freebsd.org>
To:        Morgan Reed <morgan.s.reed@gmail.com>, Vick Khera <vivek@khera.org>
Cc:        FreeBSD Stable List <stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: entropy lockup
Message-ID:  <1505172845.32063.90.camel@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAKnh_YsW5DsZ5=Z-bdM2XAG2UrkDotCxVz5EdCY6ZqWzvWS8rg@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CALd%2Bdcd6bG%2BNpk=PEwSGJEbC-EQb57MwjKh9xG38S-a50CK3TA@mail.gmail.com> <CAKnh_YsW5DsZ5=Z-bdM2XAG2UrkDotCxVz5EdCY6ZqWzvWS8rg@mail.gmail.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 2017-09-12 at 09:20 +1000, Morgan Reed wrote:
> In all likelihood the process wasn't "hung" per-se, more likely
> random
> hadn't been seeded yet and as such you *can't* get 4096b of entropy
> out of
> it (so the process was attempting to do its job, just nothing on the
> device).
>=20
> The issue is basically that there are very few "good" entropy sources
> in a
> VM environment, and as such (particularly on a machine which is only
> running SSH) there's not enough data available to seed random.
>=20
> Check 'man 4 random' for some discussion.
>=20

The save-entropy files get written from a crontab entry. =A0That means
the system is already up and running, which means it's well past the
point of hanging because it needs to be seeded. =A0Once it is seeded, it
can never "run out of entropy".

So all in all, this is a genuine problem of some sort. =A0The fact that
the save-entropy process has accumulated 48+ minutes of cpu time is
another problem indicator. =A0The process state is RL, runnable and
waiting to acquire a lock, which seems contradictory (unless that means
it's waiting for a spinlock maybe).

-- Ian

> On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 12:02 AM, Vick Khera <vivek@khera.org> wrote:
>=20
> >=20
> > I just had a VM running in Google's cloud become totally useless,
> > and I
> > tracked it down to the save-entropy operation.
> >=20
> > Basically this process was sucking up all CPU, even when nothing
> > else
> > running other than my ssh shell:
> >=20
> > % ps axuw803
> > USER=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0PID=A0=A0%CPU %MEM=A0=A0VSZ=A0=A0RSS TT=A0=A0STAT =
STARTED=A0=A0=A0=A0=A0TIME COMMAND
> > operator 803 100.0=A0=A00.1 8336 2096=A0=A0-=A0=A0RL=A0=A0=A008:55=A0=
=A0=A048:20.14 dd
> > if=3D/dev/random of=3Dsaved-entropy.1 bs=3D4096 count=3D1
> >=20
> >=20
> > The process is unkillable, and I cannot even get the system to shut
> > down.
> > That has been hanging for about 10 minutes so far, with the last
> > output
> > being
> >=20
> > System shutdown time has arrive90 second watchdSep 11 09:50:02
> > yertle init:
> > /bin/sh on /etc/rc.shutdown terminated abnormally, going to single
> > user
> > mode
> > Sep 11 09:50:47 init: some processes would not die; ps axl advised
> > Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `vnlru' to stop... done
> > Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `bufdaemon' to stop...
> > done
> > Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `syncer' to stop...
> > Syncing disks, vnodes remaining... 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 timed out
> > 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
> >=20
> >=20
> > Running FreeBSD 11.1-p1 on a 1CPU standard machine in GCE.
> >=20
> > What's the proper recovery from this kind of lockup, or how to
> > prevent it?
> > I've never encountered this on a bare metal system, or other KVM
> > based
> > machines.
> > _______________________________________________
> > freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list
> > https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebs
> > d.org"
> >=20
>=20
>=20



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?1505172845.32063.90.camel>