The kernel itself sometimes need randomness, and probably manages to
keep the enthropy pool completely drained. Remember, /dev/random
means "don't give me anything unless you can promise it's fresh
entrophy."
Anything that is meant to be a server really pretty much needs an
enthropy generator these days. We really should push vendors to
provide it (together with serial console firmware and other "well,
duh" things rackmount servers should have as a matter of course.)
Once you have software to assist you, meaning that you don't require
that every bit stepping off the wire is truly random, just a
predictable minimum, then building an RNG is a trivial number of
components -- although some care has to be taken in their assembly.
This means, IMO, that we should push on server motherboard
manufacturers more so than, for example, chipsets: although
integration tend to improve pervasiveness, ICs are awfully noisy
beasts.
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt <amsp@zytor.com> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/