IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM on its way out

According to Linux Weekly News article 507115
http://lwn.net/Articles/507115/ , the flag IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM, which
drivers use to tell the kernel whether to use interrupts from their
device(s) as a source of entropy for the entropy pool that backs the
kernel's RNG or not, is liable to become redundant from 3.6 onwards.
"After this change, adding randomness from interrupts ... is done by
default for all interrupts". This means that at that point I can remove
the flag in my out-of-line pciaer driver
(http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~amw/pciaer/index.html) along with the handling
of a module parameter (no_sample_random) which I provided to allow
paranoiacs to turn the use of IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM off. This might have
been important if very regular address-event senders and/or receivers
were in use (e.g. during test) but high quality random-number generation
were still important.

I've queued this change up in my TODO file.

New releases

On Thursday, 23 September, openSUSE released a security and bugfix update for the Linux kernel on openSUSE 11.2. As a consequence of this I've rebuilt the gpib-linux RPM again, and also made a new release (2.41) of the pciaer driver which includes a few improvements that I've put in now and then over the past few months.

And I've made a start on pciaer 2.42, ripping out the previously deprecated debug ioctl interface (the same functionality is available via debugfs instead) and removing a few redundant initializers. The next things I want to do before the next release include deprecating a couple more ioctl calls and introducing compat_ioctl handling where necessary to ensure everything works correctly on 64 bit, which is something I never worried about up until now.

Releases

Released version 2.33 of my pciaer driver today (release notes here), plus the RPM for the GPIB package I was discussing in the previous post.