On my latest NixOS install I suddenly noticed that during the boot process I received the now-famous message:
RDRAND gives funky smelling output, might consider not using it by booting with nordrand
And a just a few hours later, when trying to start the Nheko Matrix client, I got this:
šŗ nheko
WARNING: CPU random generator seem to be failing, disabling hardware random number generation
WARNING: RDRND generated: 0xffffffff 0xffffffff 0xffffffff 0xffffffff
Now, I have Ryzen 7 3700x CPU, which I know did have some issues regarding RdRand a while back. My motherboardās (an MSI B450 Tomahawk) BIOS is not up to date with the latest firmware version, so I assume that flashing the latest firmware version will fix this issue. Alternatively, I could probably boot with the nordrand
kernel option.
However, I do find this a little strange, because I have hardware.cpu.amd.updateMicrocode = true;
set in my configuration. Should this issue not have been fixed by newer CPU microcode updates? Werenāt these updates included in the Linux kernel a long time ago?
Iām on NixOS 21.05 with Linux kernel 5.12.10:
šŗ uname -a
Linux yokohama 5.12.10 #1-NixOS SMP Thu Jun 10 11:41:49 UTC 2021 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Have a look through /proc/sysinfo
reveals that I am what looks like microcode version 0x8701013
, which I think might indeed be quite old, but Iām unsure because itās so hard to get any decent info on microcode versions out there.
šŗ grep 'model\|microcode' /proc/cpuinfo
model : 113
model name : AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor
microcode : 0x8701013
Iām a little confused on this, can anyone provide me with some hints on how to take care of this? Iād rather first figure out why this is happening before fixing it with a BIOS firmware update or using nordrand
.