Re: [PATCH v2 01/15] Documentation: add newcx initramfs format description

[Victor Kamensky]

On Fri, 26 Jan 2018, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Jan 2018, Rob Landley wrote:
> > That said, I don't think -h newcx should emit (or recognize) the
> > "TRAILER!!!1!" entry. That's kinda silly in-band signaling for 2018:
> > files have a length, pipes provide EOF, and each cpiox entry starts with
> > 6 bytes of c_magic anyway.

My understanding that TRAILER is really used on tape devices,
there is no notion of file end in this case, it is just a stream of bytes
from char device.

Thanks,
Victor

> > (I stopped toybox from producing the TRAILER
> > entry back in june, toybox commit 32550751997d, and the kernel consumes
> > the resulting cpio just fine. All the trailer does is prevent you from
> > concatenating cpio files, which is a feature multiple people asked me for.)
>
> Not in the kernel.  What TRAILER does in the kernel is to act as a
> barrier for the hardlink creation state, which IS a good thing.  You
> could just specify it as such for "newcx".
>
> The kernel will continue reading for more entries after TRAILER, so
> concatenation is not broken by TRAILER.  It is also insensitive to
> NUL-padding length (as long as it is 4-byte aligned), which is another
> nice feature you could specify for "newcx".
>
> Also, the kernel does something nothing in userspace ever tried to,
> AFAIK: it detects compression signatures along with the CPIO header
> signatures, and thus it can take several compressed and uncompressed
> archives concatenater together (and the compressor doesn't need to be
> the same, either).
> --
>  Henrique Holschuh