Re: Linux 2.6.20-rc7

From: Alexander E. Patrakov
Date: Thu Feb 01 2007 - 01:47:00 EST


H. Peter Anvin wrote:
Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
It would be interesting to know what the inode numbers are in the image; also,
what is the exact behaviour -- do you end up with a missing link, or do both
entries end up getting hard-linked to an empty file?

Judging by the

request_module: runaway loop modprobe binfmt-0000

one or more of the hardlinked binaries (modprobe being one, but not necessarily the one that initially triggers hits) will read all zeroes-

Or at least bytes at offsets 2 and 3 will read as zero, causing it to not be recognized as a proper binary, causing that "binfmt-0000" thing.


Or perhaps not read at all, which would explain the problem.

cpio represents a hard link as who headers with the same type and the same file (inode) number and a link count that is > 1. Only the first one contains data; the subsequent ones have length 0. It's fairly easy for a bug in the decoder to truncate the file upon encountering the second header, since this is somewhat of a special case (it would have been better if the cpio format distinguished "hard link" explicitly, as tar does.)

I will look into this as soon as I can, but as I'm currently in the middle of job hunting it might take until the weekend.

What's the proper way to make sure that the fix, when it appears, ends up in my inbox?

--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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