Re: [PATCH] initramfs: CPIO unpacking fix

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Wed Mar 22 2006 - 02:11:16 EST


Michael Neuling wrote:
Unlink files, symlinks, FIFOs, devices etc. (except directories) before
writing them when extracting CPIOs. This stops weird behaviour like:
1) writing through symlinks created in earlier CPIOs. eg foo->bar in
the first CPIO. Having foo as a non-link in a subsequent CPIO,
results in bar being written and foo remaining as a symlink. 2) if the first version of file foo is larger than foo in a
subsequent CPIO, we end up with a mix of the two. ie. neither
the first or second version of /foo.
3) special files like devices, fifo etc. can't be overwritten in
subsequent CPIOS.

With this, the kernel will more closely replicate
for i in *.cpio; do cpio --extract --unconditional < $i ; done

This is a change but it's regarded as fixing broken functionality.

Signed-off-by: Michael Neuling <mikey@xxxxxxxxxxx>

For the kernel, I would regard that as needless code... Coding for a chain of CPIO archives overwriting each other seems like overengineering.

Jeff



-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/