If you own an Intel CPU made in the last decade? 15 years? you've already got one. PowerPC's got the DARN instruction as well.

What Theodore Ts'o said about it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180611180213/https://plus.goog...

(This Theodore Ts'o: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Ts%27o)

You obviously should never use a hardware module as your only source of entropy. What loeg is pointing out is that if you need a hardware RNG (in addition to your seedfile, RTC, environmental noise, etc), a modern CPU fills that particular role in the SRNG system without any additional hardware.

I have a great deal of respect for Ted Ts'o but I don't think this concern has much merit. If your CPU vendor is an attacker, there are much more trivial ways for the manufacturer to break your security in hard to detect ways.

Hardware has random failures, software only systematic ones.

Aging is an issue, as is EMR and power supply.

this is an odd conclusion to make from my article, given that the entire point of it is to assert the difficulty in establishing trust and the lack of wisdom in relying on a single source