I think it would be beneficial to include Robert Love's netdev-random patch in the gentoo-sources package. The site describing this patch is at http://www.tech9.net/rml/linux/ and the patch files themselves are available at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/netdev-random/. I have succesfully applied this patch against gentoo-sources-2.4.20-r5. Modifications made by this patch will not be noticed by users who don't require it, as they have to turn on the option during kernel configuration, while it will save users who require this patch a significant amount of time (I've spent 5 hours today looking for an appropriate patch for accepting entropy from network devices). I've been having problems with entropy running out on a headless SMP server, and other patches to use audio or video input as entropy can't be explored as this server has no soundcard nor video4linux input device. netdev_random is the best route to take. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Depending on the amount of applications requiring input from /dev/random, /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail will slowly decrease to zero, at which point /dev/random becomes useless without input from the keyboard or mouse. As this is a headless server I'm working on, these options are not reasonable, entropy is required from an active source, that source being the network card. Actual Results: /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail reaches zero, services requiring /dev/random block until entropy is provided in the form of keyboard/mouse input Expected Results: /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail should be maintained during normal operation - with a headless server we cannot expect entropy from standard inputs such as keyboard or mouse, so we must gather it from the network device. See two patches attached.
Created attachment 15628 [details, diff] Core patch for netdev_random This file patches the kernel config to allow for enabling of netdev_random
Created attachment 15629 [details, diff] Patch for network drivers to enable netdev_random This patches all network drivers to include SA_SAMPLE_RANDOM
+1 for this to get done asap, see bug 37039 for a need for it. as temporary workarounds, there are a lot of interesting RNG methods out there (see clrngd for one eg i've added to the tree).
look in -r4
