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Bug 60203

Summary: exit code of mkinitrd is not reliable
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Paul Clements <paul.clements>
Component: mkinitrdAssignee: Matt Wilson <msw>
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE QA Contact: David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.2Keywords: FutureFeature
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Enhancement
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2002-02-21 21:55:34 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Paul Clements 2002-02-21 21:55:30 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7-2.24mlsmp i686)

Description of problem:
mkinitrd 3.2.6-1:

It would be very helpful if the exit code of mkinitrd could be relied upon to
determine whether an error occurred during the making of an initrd image. There
are several cases where mkinitrd fails to create a usable initrd but still exits
with a 0 value. If mkinitrd is used in a script, this can cause unwanted
failures and kernel panics.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
For example, given a shell script that performs an automated kernel upgrade:

mkinitrd /boot/initrd 2.4.9-21
[ $? -ne 0 ] && echo "ERROR" && exit 1

{...append entry to lilo.conf...}

lilo
[ $? -ne 0 ] && echo "ERROR" && exit 1


Now, fill /boot almost full. When the "gzip -9" command at the bottom of the
mkinitrd script fails, an incomplete initrd image is produced. However, the exit
value of mkinitrd is 0. If the system is rebooted after lilo is run, the kernel
will panic.

Actual Results:  exit value of 0 when errors occurred during mkinitrd

Expected Results:  exit value of 1 if errors occur

Additional info:

Comment 1 Erik Troan 2002-05-21 21:22:10 UTC
should be better in 3.3.11 -- probably more work needs to be done though