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

From: "Kok, Auke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 May 2008 11:40:12 -0700

Alan Cox wrote:
>> So what is one to do if a few applications want to read from /dev/random
>> but you have no excellent source of entropy on the system?  Wait
>> forever?  
> 
> Yes.
> 
> If they don't need that level of security they can use /dev/urandom.
> Piping network randomness into /dev/urandom is probably quite sensible
> but not into /dev/random.

I remember Jesse telling that he had this very same experience while installing a
RH box on a headless system with a serial console - a box prompted the user to
rattle a keyboard in order for the ssh key generation to continue :)

you absolutely don't want to use urandom for that I assume, but if the system just
sits dead waiting for randomness, and you can't see the popup asking for some
entropy, you're pretty much screwed :)

Auke