Darwin Hardware ohai plugin can timeout on Big Sur and not set any properties.

[epilatow]

Recently I was debugging a failure to initialize node['shard_seed'] on a Darwin host. The host was running Big Sur and chef 16.2.50, but I believe the issue still applies to the the latest ohai plugins. While debugging the problem I discovered that the Hardware ohai plugin was not setting any properties. Digging into the problem I discovered that running system_profiler SPHardwareDataType -xml on a Big Sur host can take minutes (other system_profiler subcommands still run in a reasonable amount of time). But when running this specific command took to long, the command would timeout, which would cause the plugin to abort, which resulted in no hardware properties being set. It seems like the darwin hardware ohai plugin (see chef/ohai/lib/ohai/plugins/darwin/hardware.rb) should handle timeouts triggered by subcommands. A fix for this might look something like this.

[ChefAustin]

system_profiler does have a -timeout option that could be used when compiling the hardware hash but I don't know what would be considered a sane default.