Re: CONFIG_KERNEL_XZ obscure build failure if xz(1) not installed

[Lasse Collin]

On 2011-02-10 Andy Isaacson wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 12:01:42AM +0200, Lasse Collin wrote:
> > On 2011-02-09 Andy Isaacson wrote:
> > > % ls -l arch/x86/boot/bzImage
> > > -rw-r--r-- 1 adi adi 1991504 Feb  1 18:41 arch/x86/boot/bzImage
> > 
> > "Feb 1" was about a week ago. The file is a few days older than the
> > commit ID, assuming that your clock is set correctly.
> 
> Ah, yes, this is my regular build tree; I routinely pull and build
> there.
> 
> So the build failed, but the output file remains because it failed on
> an intermediate step.  (This testing was from me reproducing it on a
> different system, with 100b33).
> 
> Rewinding to the original system which failed to boot...
> 
> How did "make install" create a broken
> /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38-rc3-0312-gcb5520f that caused the boot-time
> error message?
> 
> If I re-run "make -j4" in the tree that caused the problem, make
> fails with exit code 2.
> 
> The following seems to reproduce the silent error:
> 
> rm .config
> make defconfig
> make -j4
> edit .config and set CONFIG_KERNEL_XZ=y, CONFIG_KERNEL_GZIP=n
> 
> % make -j4
> ...
> Kernel: arch/x86/boot/bzImage is ready  (#64)
> % echo $?
> 0

It looks a like a bug in dash. The following with dash prints foo bar 
and returns with exit status 0, but other shells print only foo and 
return with non-zero exit status:

    sh -c 'set -e ; echo foo ; ( false ) ; echo bar'

That is, "set -e" has no effect on a subshell returning a non-zero exit 
status. Without a subshell it works correctly:

    sh -c 'set -e ; echo foo ; { false ; } ; echo bar'

Kernel compression and mkpiggy use command lines that hit this bug. Here 
is a quick hack to avoid the unneeded subshell for these command lines, 
which also works around the dash bug:

    sed -i 's|( *\( *rm -f $@ ; false\) *)|{ \1 ; }|' \
        scripts/Makefile.lib arch/x86/boot/compressed/Makefile

There are similar "set -e" + subshell constructs in other makefiles and 
scripts. I don't know if it makes sense to accommodate a buggy but 
common /bin/sh by modifying makefiles and scripts to avoid the 
problematic construct. Maybe it would be better to have a test to catch 
the buggy shell and tell the user to use e.g. "make SHELL=/bin/bash".

-- 
Lasse Collin  |  IRC: Larhzu @ IRCnet & Freenode
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