Bug#935407: Failure to unpack initrd should be handled better
Bernhard Übelacker @ 2019-07-16 (Tuesday), 22:01 (+0200)
just tried to have a look at the part where steal-ctty is crashing.
Thank you Bernhard!
Maybe that situation could be detected when the initramfs was not
unpacked successfully, but has enough unpacked to attempt starting
the installer.
I'm no kernel hacker but to the best of my understanding populate_rootfs()
seems to be returning zero regardless of whether it fails or not. Reading
that source code[1], as well as the relevant documentation[2,3], gives me
the impression there is no way to make the kernel fail in any other way than
to merely print error message and continue. Right?
[ 0.564101] Unpacking initramfs...
[ 0.634972] Initramfs unpacking failed: write error
Since this error message appears in the log and attempting to continue after
it will guaranteed yield in strange behaviour, the best thing would likely
be if debian-installer looked for it before attempting to do anything else
and failed hard with a descriptive error message.
Due to Debian BTS harvested addresses being my primary spam source, I'm not
monitoring this address. Yet I follow the bug report and my contact info is
avaible at https://bugs.debian.org/199392#40 if needed.
--
/Martin
[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/init/initramfs.c
[2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.html
[3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt
Reply to: