Re: [PATCH RESEND] initramfs: cleanup incomplete rootfs

From: David Engraf
Date: Mon Feb 11 2019 - 03:49:57 EST


On 11.02.19 at 08:56, David Engraf wrote:
On 09.02.19 at 11:35, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 12:08 AM Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 21:45:21 +0200 Andy Shevchenko <andy.shevchenko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 5:22 PM David Engraf <david.engraf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Unpacking an external initrd may fail e.g. not enough memory. This leads
to an incomplete rootfs because some files might be extracted already.
Fixed by cleaning the rootfs so the kernel is not using an incomplete
rootfs.

This breaks my setup where I have U-boot provided more size of
initramfs than needed. This allows a bit of flexibility to increase or
decrease initramfs compressed image without taking care of bootloader.
The proper solution is to do this if we sure that we didn't get enough
memory, otherwise I can't consider the error fatal to clean up rootfs.

OK, thanks. Maybe David can suggest a fix - I'll queue up a revert
meanwhile.

I don't really understand the failure. Why does an oversized initramfs
cause unpack_to_rootfs() to fail?

In my case I have got "Junk in compressed archive". I don't know (I
would check if needed) which exact condition I got since there are
three places with this message. The file itself smaller than the size
passed through bootparam. So, when decomression is finished
(successfully!) we still have a garbarge in the memory which is not
related to archive. Message per se is okay to have, though I consider
this non-fatal.

I can reproduce this special case. The unpacking decompresses the whole size instead of checking the archive size. I will have a look how to get the real archive size.

I did some checks and manually increased the initramfs size but I always get the following kernel panic:

Kernel panic - not syncing: junk in compressed archive
---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: junk in compressed archive

The panic was not introduced by my patch. Could you please check if you get a panic as well or is your rootfs just empty?

I also had a look at the decompression in unpack_to_rootfs(). This function already ensures unpacking only the real size of the archive. But it is called in a loop, thus it unpacks the first archive and then tries to unpack the reset of the data which are garbage in my case.
Is it intended to allow extracting multiple archives as rootfs? If not we could remove the loop and unpack only the first archive. Otherwise we could ignore errors when the first archive was extracted without errors.

Best regards
- David