Bug#412799: [Yaird-devel] Bug#412799: linux-image-2.6.18-4-686 does not boot

[Svante Signell]

reassign 412799 cpio
severity 412799 serious
Tags: experimental

On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 15:53 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 10:54:26PM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> 
> > > So, now it just bears determining why these symlinks are broken.  That's
> > > more than a little unusual, frankly; somehow the target of each of these
> > > links seems to have gotten corrupted with extra characters after the end of
> > > the name, which to me suggests that the name is being written to a reused
> > > buffer and the string is not being null-terminated.  Now how is that
> > > happening, when yaird is written in perl?
> 
> > Yaird comes with a few small helper tools written in C, including
> > "findlibs" which probably is to blame here.
> 
> A code review shows that findlibs is only supposed to be invoked on binaries
> that don't link against glibc, which is not the case here.
> 
> And as noted, the bug apparently doesn't manifest with -f directory,
> only with -f cpio.
> 
> I think the most likely explanation is an incompatibility with glibc 2.5,
> due to a bug in one of cpio, glibc, or perl.

I have found the problem: cpio. The installed version on the box is from 
experimental (2.7-0exp1) and the testing/unstable version is 2.6.17. Downgrading 
to 2.6-17 makes the initrd image non-corrupt and 2.6.18-4-686 boots again with
a yaird-generated image :-)

Fortunately I didn't have to downgrade to libc6-2.3.6.ds1-13, that would
remove 180 packages for me. Thanks for helping out to debug this
problem.

-- 
Svante Signell <svante.signell at telia.com>