Re: [PATCH] Re: [PATCH] drivers/net: remove network drivers' last few uses of IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM

From: Herbert Xu
Date: Fri May 16 2008 - 21:02:15 EST


On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 06:25:12PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
>
> You could do that, but what advantage would it have? I don't think it's
> worth running the FIPS test, or rather requiring the user land daemon
> and leaving behind most of the userbase just for this.

The obvious advantage is that you don't unblock /dev/random readers
until there is real entropy available.

Remember that a hardware RNG failure is a catastrophic event, so
a heavy-handed response such as blocking /dev/random is reasonable.

Cheers,
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