Remove WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM kernel config optionHEADmaster

This config option goes way back - it used to be an internal debug
option to random.c (at that point called DEBUG_RANDOM_BOOT), then was
renamed and exposed as a config option as CONFIG_WARN_UNSEEDED_RANDOM,
and then further renamed to the current CONFIG_WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM.

It was all done with the best of intentions: the more limited
rate-limited reports were reporting some cases, but if you wanted to see
all the gory details, you'd enable this "ALL" option.

However, it turns out - perhaps not surprisingly - that when people
don't care about and fix the first rate-limited cases, they most
certainly don't care about any others either, and so warning about all
of them isn't actually helping anything.

And the non-ratelimited reporting causes problems, where well-meaning
people enable debug options, but the excessive flood of messages that
nobody cares about will hide actual real information when things go
wrong.

I just got a kernel bug report (which had nothing to do with randomness)
where two thirds of the the truncated dmesg was just variations of

   random: get_random_u32 called from __get_random_u32_below+0x10/0x70 with crng_init=0

and in the process early boot messages had been lost (in addition to
making the messages that _hadn't_ been lost harder to read).

The proper way to find these things for the hypothetical developer that
cares - if such a person exists - is almost certainly with boot time
tracing.  That gives you the option to get call graphs etc too, which is
likely a requirement for fixing any problems anyway.

See Documentation/trace/boottime-trace.rst for that option.

And if we for some reason do want to re-introduce actual printing of
these things, it will need to have some uniqueness filtering rather than
this "just print it all" model.

Fixes: cc1e127bfa95 ("random: remove ratelimiting for in-kernel unseeded randomness")
Acked-by: Jason Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 27 deletions

diff --git a/lib/Kconfig.debug b/lib/Kconfig.debug
index 4e2dfbbd3d78..318df4c75454 100644
--- a/lib/Kconfig.debug
+++ b/lib/Kconfig.debug
@@ -1766,33 +1766,6 @@ config STACKTRACE
 	  It is also used by various kernel debugging features that require
 	  stack trace generation.
 
-config WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM
-	bool "Warn for all uses of unseeded randomness"
-	default n
-	help
-	  Some parts of the kernel contain bugs relating to their use of
-	  cryptographically secure random numbers before it's actually possible
-	  to generate those numbers securely. This setting ensures that these
-	  flaws don't go unnoticed, by enabling a message, should this ever
-	  occur. This will allow people with obscure setups to know when things
-	  are going wrong, so that they might contact developers about fixing
-	  it.
-
-	  Unfortunately, on some models of some architectures getting
-	  a fully seeded CRNG is extremely difficult, and so this can
-	  result in dmesg getting spammed for a surprisingly long
-	  time.  This is really bad from a security perspective, and
-	  so architecture maintainers really need to do what they can
-	  to get the CRNG seeded sooner after the system is booted.
-	  However, since users cannot do anything actionable to
-	  address this, by default this option is disabled.
-
-	  Say Y here if you want to receive warnings for all uses of
-	  unseeded randomness.  This will be of use primarily for
-	  those developers interested in improving the security of
-	  Linux kernels running on their architecture (or
-	  subarchitecture).
-
 config DEBUG_KOBJECT
 	bool "kobject debugging"
 	depends on DEBUG_KERNEL