Alan Cox wrote:

Chris Peterson [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I know Jeff Garzik says he's not interested in an anti-entropy
pogrom for existing net drivers, but here is the patch if anyone
else is interested..? :)  

Only 12 net drivers are affected, the last of the
theoretically-exploitable network entropy. 

Looks fine to me. If Jeff doesn't want to touch them then send them
direct to Andrew/Linus.

A more interesting alternative might be to mark things like network
drivers with a new flag say IRQF_SAMPLE_DUBIOUS so that users can be
given a switch to enable/disable their use depending upon the
environment. 

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.