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Bug 1645853 - PXE boot on armhfp slow due to Kernel wait for crng random data
Summary: PXE boot on armhfp slow due to Kernel wait for crng random data
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED INSUFFICIENT_DATA
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: kernel
Version: 29
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Kernel Maintainer List
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks: ARMTracker
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2018-11-04 11:47 UTC by Adam Farden
Modified: 2019-10-24 05:44 UTC (History)
18 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2019-04-09 20:07:06 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:
adam.farden: needinfo-

Attachments (Terms of Use)
Orange Pi Zero boot log (40.83 KB, text/plain)
2018-11-04 11:47 UTC, Adam Farden 		no flags Details
haveged dracut service (590 bytes, application/x-shellscript)
2018-11-06 09:36 UTC, Adam Farden 		no flags Details
haveged dracut service (483 bytes, text/plain)
2018-11-06 09:36 UTC, Adam Farden 		no flags Details
View All

Description Adam Farden 2018-11-04 11:47:25 UTC 
Created attachment 1501264 [details]
Orange Pi Zero boot log

PXE boot of armhfp is currently extremely slow, it takes approximately 30 minutes to boot.

Initially I thought the boot process had crashed, but I accidentally left a board running over night and found that it did in fact boot fully.

Excerpt from attached log:

[   32.563926] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
[   35.645250] dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet eth0: Link is Up - 100Mbps/Full - flow control rx/tx
[   35.653913] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
[   46.614805] random: fast init done
[ 1765.884569] random: crng init done
[ 1765.888005] random: 7 urandom warning(s) missed due to ratelimiting
[ 1768.536500] dracut-initqueue[842]: RTNETLINK answers: File exists
[ 1769.979625] FS-Cache: Loaded
[ 1770.100155] FS-Cache: Netfs 'nfs' registered for caching

I found related bugs for x86 platform, but it looks like the fix was not applicable to armhfp platform.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1572944
Comment 1 Adam Farden 2018-11-05 08:07:07 UTC 
I should not that this is only for PXE boot, boot works as expected when using an SD Card. The same behaviour is seen with Raspberry Pi 3, so it's not limited to this board.

I noticed that when eventually booted the amount of entropy available increases very slowly, on the order of 1 bit every few seconds (as seen by polling /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail). I have no idea yet if this is normal or not, but I suspect it is not.

So I'm currently investigating why a PXE boot cannot provide entropy for /dev/random but an SD Card boot can. The only difference I've seen so far  by comparing logs from UART are a few modprobe failures when booting from PXE.

However this is far outside my area of expertise, any insights would be welcome.

Google searching the issue has pointed me to a service called haveged, which I will try adding to the initial initrd.img.
Comment 2 Adam Farden 2018-11-06 09:36:08 UTC 
Created attachment 1502353 [details]
haveged dracut service
Comment 3 Adam Farden 2018-11-06 09:36:40 UTC 
Created attachment 1502354 [details]
haveged dracut service
Comment 4 Adam Farden 2018-11-06 09:41:43 UTC 
So I was able to boot in under a minute when I added the haveged dracut service to the pxeboot initrd (see attached).

If a fix is required, should it be in the kernel, or should it be in the dracut image?

As it is right now, the current pxeboot image is likely useless for most, if not all, armhfp boards.
Comment 5 Adam Farden 2018-11-08 13:19:47 UTC 
I failed to mention this but the original initrd.img and vmlinuz came from https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/29/Server/armhfp/os/images/pxeboot/ which is Linux version 4.18.16-300.fc29.armv7hl
Comment 6 Jeremy Cline 2018-12-03 17:33:28 UTC 
We apologize for the inconvenience.  There is a large number of bugs to go through and several of them have gone stale.  Due to this, we are doing a mass bug update across all of the Fedora 29 kernel bugs.
 
Fedora 29 has now been rebased to 4.19.5-300.fc29.  Please test this kernel update (or newer) and let us know if you issue has been resolved or if it is still present with the newer kernel.
 
If you experience different issues, please open a new bug report for those.
Comment 7 Laura Abbott 2019-04-09 20:07:06 UTC 
Since this bug hasn't been updated since the last needinfo I'm going to close this bug. Please test on the newest kernel and reopen if the problem persists.
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