Decrypt master key takes long

Support
1

Hi All,

I’ve just installed Manjaro Gnome 20.2.1 (on a test laptop Lenovo X240). When booting it, after typing the passphrase, I have to wait around 45 seconds. This sound to me terribly long.

Anyone an idea how to fix this ?

Thanks in advance for your help,
Lionel

2

That is normal when you use a default Calamares install.

There is a couple of reasons

  1. I don’t recall the exact number of round trips used by Calamares but I think it is a high number (200000 or more) - the higher the number the better resilience against brute-force attacks.
  2. Grub does not supported LUKS2 - only LUKS1 and the combination creates the long boot time.

The solution is to do a manual install using systemd as boot loader and LUKS2 encryption or select manual partitioning in Calamares and add an unencrypted partition (1G ext2 formatted) mounted on /boot.

3

Thanks for the quick answer!
Is there nothing I can do without re-installing ?

4

Maybe - I don’t know - I really cannot imagine how it should be possible - after all the disk is encrypted. That alone makes it difficult to alter the installation. Some have tried to boot a live USB and tried to alter the encryption strategy manually - but I have never heard of any one succeed.

But if you are a seasoned Linux user - search the Arch wiki on LUKS - see what you can find. I am quite convinced that you will end up using a lot more hours and get a lot more frustrated and in the end you will ask yourself - why didn’t I just reinstall the system …

You can find several guides - also on this forum - or the archive describing in details how to accomplish the task at hand.

5

It is possible to convert LUKS1 to LUKS2
info here for instance
and the bootloader can also be changed.
The info on that is likely also in the Arch wiki
… it may be quicker to reinstall than to gather the information and then to adapt the current setup
like @linux-aarhus said

6

Thanks for your help. I will re-install, it’s true it’s not so long.

7