Entropy source for pipelines builds

[Anthony Schmieder]

Our test suite takes about 20 minutes to run locally and 60-90 minutes to run in pipelines. We tracked the problem to `SecureRandom` blocking on reads of /dev/random. I've been trying to fix this by adding another entropy source using haveged. Unfortunately I can't run it inside a docker container (fails on an ioctl call). Has anyone else found a nice way to work around this? Is there any hope of Atlassian adding haveged to the host VMs if they don't already have it? This closed issue suggests it's not a high priority.

[Graham Gatus · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anthony Schmieder

You can use a non blocking source of randomness by using /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random.

Assuming you are on Java, you should be able to pass a sys prop use the alternative source:

-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/urandom

 Alternatively, in your pipeline you can remove /dev/random and symlink /dev/urandom in its place:

rm -f /dev/random && ln -s /dev/urandom /dev/random

Cheers

Graham

[Anthony Schmieder]

Thanks, @Graham Gatus! Your first suggestion is what we ended up using. The resources we found recommend

-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom

Since the JVM assumes you mean "/dev/random" when you write "/dev/urandom" (ref: option 2)