Long delay during boot using encrypted root filesystem

[robotpoet]

Binary package hint: initramfs-tools

After upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10 there appeared a very long delay (several minutes) during boot, before the appearance of the prompt to enter the password for the root file system. I decided to investigate and saw in /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptroot that there were some lines to create a very long delay if the ROOTDELAY variable was not set. Without fully understanding what was going on, I decided to try adding "rootdelay=5" to my boot parameters, which actually solved the problem of the long delay during boot.

I suspect many users would not be able to find this solution, so the default behavior should perhaps be improved.

I have an IDE harddrive with encrypted root on sda5 which is the first logical drive on the extended partition. This is on a fully updated Ubuntu 8.10.

~ $ cat /etc/crypttab
# <target device> <source device> <key file> <options>
root /dev/sda5 none cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256,size=256,hash=ripemd160
swap /dev/sda2 /dev/urandom swap
~ $

Please let me know if you need additional information.