> Oh, and by the way -- a random number pool device would be bloody
> useful! If someone could port Ted Ts'o's driver, provided that it didn't
> result in a significant performance hit, would be a real win for me,
> and for people running PGP and other sorts of security oriented
> programs. Random number sources are really important for security. A
> device would mean that you could have software implementations on
> machines without RNG hardware, but that applications could
> transparently take advantage of such hardware on machines that had
> it. It also would reduce the number of places for random number
> generator failure to occur.
> 
> Perry

I really don't think random number functionality should appear in the
kernel.  I don't see any reason why this should be a kernel service.

fyi: the driver you refer to is GPLed to my knowledge and thus would
never appear in the kernel as distributed from us.

later,
Adam Glass