On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 08:43:33AM +0000, Brice Waegeneire wrote: > This article has been updated since then with a section[0] about a fix > authored by Linus[1][2] and merged in Linux 5.4. The gist of it that now > `getrandom()' will actively try to collect entropy in early boot, if it > is missing, by using the CPU jitter. The Debian wiki is saying the same[3].
The issue here is not related to getrandom() or our kernel. I think the bug is still relevant. The Guix system unconditionally reads from /dev/hwrng if it exists, and there is no reason for that to take a noticeable amount of time. But this bug report revealed that some VPS providers have a broken deployment that does cause delays. Who knows how they are feeding /dev/hwrng... they would not reply to my questions. It doesn't really matter though, the problem is ours to fix. We need to make this read time out after a second, but in the past I could not figure out how to do this without crashing the system (I'm not a strong Schemer). Help is still wanted!
