Hello,

While building the 3.11 kernel recently, I bumped into this issue.

Menuconfig allows one to choose compression format of an initial ramdisk 
image. But this selection does not result in creation of a duly compressed 
initramfs image. Because - $ make install - does not pass on the selected 
compression option to dracut(8) tool, which generates the initramfs file. This 
leads to a situation wherein the initramfs file is gzip(1) compressed, but the 
kernel knows only to decompress the user's chosen compression format.

The attached patch herein, attempts to fix this issue by exporting the 
compression configuration option to an environment variable of a sub-shell 
spawned by Make(1) with the invocation of installkernel(8) during the 
installation process.

The dracut(8) & new-kernel-pkg(8) tools need to be patched to recognise and 
read such an environment variable and use the selected compression algorithm 
while creating the initial ramdisk image files.

Could someone please review this one too?

Thank you.
--
Prasad J Pandit / Red Hat Security Response Team
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