Matt Mackall, the former maintainer of /dev/random, actually stepped down over this issue, because Linus overrode Matt and applied Intel's patch that used their hardware random number generator directly:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.cryptography.r...

> It's worth noting that the maintainer of record (me) for the Linux RNG quit the project about two years ago precisely because Linus decided to include a patch from Intel to allow their unauditable RdRand to bypass the entropy pool over my strenuous objections.

> From a quick skim of current sources, much of that has recently been rolled back (/dev/random, notably) but kernel-internal entropy users like sequence numbers and address-space randomization appear to still be exposed to raw RdRand output.

Ted Ts'o later reverted this, separating out Intel's hardware random number generation into a separate function that could be used to seed the entropy pool but wouldn't be trusted directly as the main kernel source of random numbers:

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...