bug#36380: service urandom-seed takes too long on boot

[Ludovic Courtès]

Leo Famulari <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 05:20:21PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> We had a “bug report” at
>> <https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190624#guixsd>, which may be
>> due to the same issue:
>> 
>>   The first time I loaded Guix the boot process took an unusually long
>>   time.  At one point the system appeared to lock up for about five
>>   minutes before continuing.  In the end, from boot menu to graphical
>>   login screen, the start-up time totalled about ten minutes.
>
> Perhaps, but if the reason for the slowness on their first boot was a
> suboptimal /dev/hwrng source, I would expect it to be equally slow for
> each boot, since we unconditionally read 64 bytes each time.

Perhaps VirtualBox behaves this way?  For instance, the VM was rebooted
but VirtualBox itself was still running, and thus it had a good random
seed to start from on the second boot (does that make sense?).  I guess
we should try.

> They are using an old machine with a spinning disk, so who knows...

Still, what else could be taking this long?

Thanks,
Ludo’.