From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com>
Subject: bug#36380: service urandom-seed takes too long on boot
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2019 10:41:47 +0100
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References: <F88CEF04-9BFA-4886-8A2D-AD84AE278D07@vllmrt.net>
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To: 36380@debbugs.gnu.org

Hi Robert,

Robert Vollmert <rob@vllmrt.net> writes:

> On my VPS, booting takes forever (long enough that for a long
> time I thought the install had failed). I just rebooted again,
> and it took over 7 minutes, see attached screenshot.
>
> I would suggest skipping the seeding from /dev/hwrng by default
> if /var/lib/random-seed is available. I=E2=80=99m assuming here that my
> problem is not too rare =E2=80=94 if it is, an option to disable the
> seeding from /dev/hwrng seems like a good idea.

I'm not sure I'm qualified on best practices with regard to urandom, but
anecdotally, my servers are booting pretty fast, within a minute,
consistently.  This is even when booting a qemu virtual image rather
than a VPS.

Perhaps something else is going on here?

Alex