On Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 08:09:32PM +0200, Stefano Brivio wrote: > On Fri, 22 Mar 2024 13:27:37 +1100 > David Gibson wrote: > > > mbuto has two ways of building the initramfs. One is the typical approach > > of staging its contents in a temporary directory, then building the > > initramfs with cpio. The other is to create an empty initramfs, mount > > it with archivemount, and copy things into the mounted archive. > > > > However, the archivemount approach is broken. I'm not entirely sure why, > > but it appears not to properly unmount the archive and retrieve the final. > > filled version. The upshot is that if archivemount is installed, then > > mbuto generates an empty, gzip-compressed initramfs instead of whatever it > > was supposed to. It looks like this has bitrotted from some earlier > > working version. > > > > The archivemount approach is not necessary, and honestly a pretty strange > > and roundabout way of building the initramfs. Remove it. > > There were two reasons behind that: first off, I mistakenly assumed > that the kernel could see changes made to the initramfs after boot. Yeah, that was never going to work. > Second, it was actually convenient for developing this tool as I could > just make directories and copies in half-working images. I also had > half a mind about some usage with QEMU rebooting the guest, and the > initramfs would change across reboots without having to call mbuto > again, for bisections or suchlike. That's not really dependent on using archivemount in any case. If qemu re-reads the initrd on each boot, then you can still do this by rebuilding the image between boots (which is all that archivemount would do anyway). If qemu doesn't re-read it, then this won't work even if you are using archivemount. > But sure, it turned out to be quite complicated to maintain, and it > looks like it has been broken on Fedora for a while now (probably due > to differences between fakeroot and fakeroot-ng I didn't take into > account), so, with some regrets, I'm fine to drop this now. > -- David Gibson | I'll have my music baroque, and my code david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au | minimalist, thank you. NOT _the_ _other_ | _way_ _around_! http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson