Random-ness when booting into single-user

[Garance A Drosihn]

When I was at the devsummit, a few developers remarked at the
annoying situation one can get into when booting into single-
user mode.  Something about various operations which can hang
because they need some random number(s), but at that point
/dev/random (or whatever the key thing is) has not been seeded
with enough entropy to give random numbers.  Apparently once
you get into this state, you have to start typing a lot of
random gibberish to get past the problem.  Something about
"dancing the fandango", if I remember right.

Happily I have not run into this, and I think I would like to
make sure that I don't run into it -- even though I obviously
don't remember any of the details...

I have been looking at sbin/init/init.c, and I was wondering
if it might be fairly easy to provide a fix to this situation.
Let's say you request single-user mode.  If you asked for
single-user mode, init.c is what will ask you which shell you
want use.

Once it knows the shell, couldn't it just do something like
first execute:
     ${SHELL} -c /etc/rc.d/preseedrandom
(and ignore any failures)

And *then* execute the standard
     ${SHELL}
for single-user mode?

Or maybe it would execute some other script to seed the
entropy, if /etc/rc.d/preseedrandom is not appropriate under
those circumstances.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu