Re: 'guix system vm' questions

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 10:10:35AM -0400, Thompson, David wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 2:57 AM, myglc2 <myglc2@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have a headless server running Guix/Debian 8.3 on which I would like
> > to run some guix vms. So far, I have a script (see mkvm.sh, attached)
> > that runs a single vm. It has some issues:
> >
> > 1) lsh-service hangs waiting for keystrokes on the QEMU console
> 
> LSH needs to be initialized with a key on first boot, which is why you
> need to type to create entropy.  This sucks for automation, so I would
> recommend OpenSSH instead, but we don't have an openssh-service yet.

In your operating system configuration, you can pass 'initialize? #f' to
lsh-service to skip the SSH seed and host-key initialization. You will
need to initialize the LSH service later, before you can use it.

How does OpenSSH get entropy without blocking on first boot? Before
shipping an openssh-service, we should make sure that OpenSSH doesn't
assume that /dev/urandom is safe to use; my understanding is that it
isn't safe immediately after first boot.

We should look into QEMU's VirtIO RNG, which could help here:
http://wiki.qemu-project.org/Features-Done/VirtIORNG