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by lmm 395 days ago
No, there was no bug. The code used an uninitialised array as a place to XOR randomness from various sources into. It didn't initialise the array since there was no value in doing so, because the whole point is to be random anyway.
1 comments

As I said, new kernels zero the pages, an uninitialized area is likely to be zeroed or be rather deterministic.
Which is fine. It's not a bug if it's zero. There's just no point going out of your way to set it to zero when you're only going to xor a bunch of random values into it anyway.
The whole issue was caused because it was always zero because the patch zeroed it (:

Can you please read about the issue before commenting more?

> The whole issue was caused because it was always zero because the patch zeroed it (:

No it wasn't. The patch removed the read of the randomness buffer that folded it into another buffer (the MD_Update calls) because Valgrind was warning that the buffer it was reading from had never been initialised.

> Can you please read about the issue before commenting more?

Right back at you.