Re: wrong final bzImage build (regading #14270)

[Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru>]

And I forgot to mention: this IS a regression in 2.6.31.

Michael Tokarev wrote:
> Ok, finally the mystery solved.  After a week of
> digging.
> 
> The original problem was titled "Cannot boot on
> a PIII Celeron", and Rafael filed a bug #14270
> for this.
> 
> In short, what I observed was that a new kernel
> (2.6.31) fails to boot on a PIII Celeron machine.
> But changing just the CPU to plain PIII and voila,
> it now works.  I don't know why it behaved this
> way, but I found where was the problem, finally.
> 
> And the problem is in the last stage of build, when
> building the bzImage.
> 
> make -f scripts/Makefile.build obj=arch/x86/boot/compressed 
> arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux
> ...
>   (cat arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin | lzma -9 && echo -ne 
> \\x38\\xd6\\x37\\x00) > arch/x86/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin.lzma
> ...
> 
> Note the echo command.
> 
> Now, Debian switched to dash as /bin/sh.  And dash
> does not understand the -e option:
> 
> $ dash -c 'echo -ne \\x38\\xd6\\x37\\x00' | od -x
> 0000000 6e2d 2065 785c 3833 785c 3664 785c 3733
> 0000020 785c 3030 000a
> 
> $ bash -c 'echo -ne \\x38\\xd6\\x37\\x00' | od -x
> 0000000 d638 0037
> 
> So the final size (it's the size of uncompressed file)
> becomes incorrect.  Here's what mkpiggy outputs for
> this (in arch/x86/boot/compressed/piggy.S):
> 
>  z_output_len = 170930296
> 
> while it should be
> 
>  z_output_len = 3659320
> 
> And with the former (wrong, larger) size, the whole
> thing just reboots on a PIII Celeron.  I've no idea
> why, but the original problem is here.
> 
> The same thing happens with bzip2 algorithm which is
> not new, not only with lzma.
> 
> The whole thing looks quite hackish to me, -- mkpiggy
> can know the size from the original image just fine,
> instead of getting it from the end of already compressed
> file.
> 
> For now, quick fix is to change echo to printf in there.
> Correct fix is to re-write mkpiggy to look at the
> original file for size (IMHO anyway).
> 
> And this is a very good candidate for -stable as well.
> The bug is very difficult to find.  And now when more
> and more people who use Debian are switching to dash,
> it will be more common.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> /mjt