we've been hearing rumblings of big customers wanting (maybe requiring)
wired network drivers from Intel to advertise this flag. Jeff have you
heard of such?
I think the argument is that a headless system (no keyboard/mouse, no
soundcard, probably no video) with a libata based driver and a network
driver without IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM has *no* sources of entropy. In this
case the argument is very strong for at least *some* source of entropy
from interrupts so that randomness can get some external input. Just
try rebuilding a kernel RPM over an ssh session and you'll see what I
mean.
In short, I agree with Alan's IRQF_SAMPLE_DUBIOUS, and know of Linux
customers who also want the same.