Comment 2 for bug 1861530

Thanks for reporting this bug and helping to improve Ubuntu.

The normal point at which this command would be run is as part of the package update process from a running session, under apt. Do you remember being prompted on a previous package manager run to set a password for registering your machine-owner key in firmware?

To diagnose why this is running at startup, it would be helpful to see the heirarchy of processes before this command (so 'pstree' or similar). That should also give us information about the environment it's running in, to determine why it's in a busy loop.

While disabling Secure Boot in your firmware will work around this runtime error, it does weaken the security of your system and is not recommended as a long-term solution.

My guess at what's happening here is that since you have dkms module packages installed but the binaries from them have not been successfully installed for the current kernel, dkms is trying to build these at boot, sign them, and enroll the key in firmware; but the enrollment fails due to lack of frontend.