Subject: network devices: to IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM or not to IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM?
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel
Date: 2008-05-13 16:49:00 GMT (1 year, 7 weeks, 3 days, 17 hours and 43 minutes ago)
Should network devices be allowed to contribute entropy to /dev/random? This issue has been discussed before, but does not seem to have been settled: some net drivers [1] use IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM when calling request_irq(), but the vast majority do not. It seems like all net drivers should follow the same entropy paranoia policy (whether that is all net drivers should use IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM, no net drivers, or a compile-time option). Robert Love wrote a patch that added such a compile-time option, CONFIG_NET_RANDOM (though I believe he stopped maintaining it in 2004). [2] chris [1] net drivers that use IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM: drivers/net/3c523.c drivers/net/3c527.c drivers/net/atlx/atl1.c drivers/net/cris/eth_v10.c drivers/net/ibmlana.c drivers/net/macb.c drivers/net/mv643xx_eth.c drivers/net/netxen/netxen_nic_main.c drivers/net/niu.c drivers/net/qla3xxx.c drivers/net/tg3.c drivers/net/xen-netfront.c [2] http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/netdev-random/