Re: NM needs 'urandom'?



On Thu, 2017-10-12 at 13:24 +0100, Colin Helliwell wrote:
On 11 October 2017 at 14:56 Thomas Haller <thaller redhat com>
wrote:

On Wed, 2017-10-11 at 13:49 +0100, colin helliwell ln-systems com
wrote:

I've noticed that my system has a delay during boot-up, of about
20secs. It
*looks* like NM is waiting for urandom - there's no "
NetworkManager
(version 1.8.2) is starting " message until right after "random:
nonblocking
pool is initialized ".
That might just be a coincidence (though other services etc
*have*
started
by then), but if not then I'm curious what the dependency is (and
whether
there's a way round it for faster boot).

Hi,

that is quite possible that NM reads urandom.
For example, to generate a key in
/var/lib/NetworkManager/secret_key

That doesn't seem wrong.

We could try to call getrandom() instead, but that probably would
block
just as long.

Thomas

Thanks Thomas. I found your blog related to this - https://blogs.gnom
e.org/thaller/category/networkmanager/ - is the use of urandom only
related to WiFi and/or IPv6 functionality (which I don't need), and
could it be disabled with a config setting?


Hi,

there are several places that might read urandom. Some might be hard to
avoid. For example, src/dhcp/nm-dhcp-client.c does g_rand_new(), which
might read /dev/urandom.

urandom is documented not to block and be suitable to call, basically
anytime.
It sounds like a bug if it really would block that long. You could run
NM under strace, to see what it's doing.


best,
Thomas

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