Hi folks,

The long discussions upstream regarding the default behaviour of Python's os.urandom() API in Python 3.6 have come to an end, with Guido opting to make os.urandom() block implicitly waiting for the system RNG to be ready, even on Linux (where /dev/urandom doesn't do that).

While I can see his point from a cross-platform language runtime design perspective, I'm still not sure it's the right answer for the Fedora system Python, as it doesn't play nice with ABRT, and goes against Ted T'so's decision to keep /dev/urandom non-blocking at the kernel level (risking confusion for folks that are Linux developers & operators first, and Pythonistas second).

If "os.urandom() was called before system RNG is ready" throws an uncaught BlockingIOError, then we'll get a nice ABRT-friendly Python stack trace for people to debug (and perhaps figure out their VM entropy pool isn't being seeded properly, or their ARM hardware design needs a better source of entropy). By contrast, if it just blocks, then folks will be faced with a system hang, which they'll need to trace back to CPython being blocked on a kernel getrandom() call, and then infer from that that the system RNG isn't ready (for whatever reason), and they should probably do something about that.

Patching this behaviour should be relatively straightforward - Python 3.5 currently makes this call in non-blocking mode and falls back to reading /dev/urandom directly in that case, so we'd just be forward porting the same logic to 3.6 and raising an exception instead of falling back to the file descriptor.

Accordingly, what I propose we do is as follows:

1. Raise the concern in the F26 system-wide change proposal for migrating to Python 3.6
2. Apply the patch when the 3.6 beta releases are added to Fedora Rawhide
3. Decide whether or not to keep the patch based on ABRT results and other feedback on the Rawhide builds.

Note that if the feedback on Rawhide shows that the change is helping people to find and diagnose VMs and hardware with improperly seeded entropy pools, that's a *good* thing: this proposed change is replacing Python 3.5's "/dev/urandom and os.urandom() may silently return statistically less-than-fully-random random numbers if the kernel entropy pool isn't seeded properly" with "os.urandom() will fail noisily in those cases, so you can either switch to the random module, or fix your entropy pool seeding".

Cheers,
Nick.

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Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia