Reviving an ancient thread: On 11/04/2014 02:18 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Mon, Nov 03, 2014 at 11:09:12AM -0500, Brian Rak wrote:
I just ran into an issue where I had about 30 guests get duplicate mac addresses assigned. These were scattered across 30 different machines.
Some debugging revealed that:
1) All the host machines were restarted within a couple seconds of each other 2) All the host machines had fairly similar libvirtd pids (within ~100 PIDs of each other) 3) Libvirt seeds the RNG using 'time(NULL) ^ getpid()'
This perfectly explains why I saw so many duplicate mac addresses.
Why is the RNG seed such a predictable value? Surely there has to be a better source of a random seed then the timestamp and the pid?
The PID seems to me to be a very bad source of any randomness. I just ran a test across 60 of our hosts. 43 of them shared their PID with at least one other machine.
We should probably seed it with data from /dev/urandom, and/or the new Linux getrandom() syscall (or BSD equivalent).
Did anyone ever open a BZ to track this? As far as I can tell, we still have a very predictable (meaning bad) seeding algorithm that permits large clusters to create collisions when their random number sequences sync up. -- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org