Half-broken Debian installer initramfs image

[Alexei Sheplyakov]

Debian installer's initrd.gz on Fuel ISO is not compressed, and contains (a broken) chunk of itself:

$ file /mnt/ubuntu/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz
/mnt/ubuntu/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz: ASCII cpio archive (SVR4 with no CRC)
$ cpio --list < /mnt/ubuntu/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz | grep -e 'initrd\.gz'
initrd.gz

Thus initrd (or rather initramfs) is more than 2x larger than it should have been:

$ ls -sh /mnt/ubuntu/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz
55M /mnt/ubuntu/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz

The original initrd is:

$ ls -hs local_mirror/ubuntu/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz
20M local_mirror/ubuntu/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz

This slows down the provisioning (2x more data should be transferred over the network) for no good reason and puts the extra load on the master node.

[Nastya Urlapova (aurlapova)]

Alexei, please add iso version.

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/138010

[Alexei Sheplyakov (asheplyakov)]

> please add iso version.

I think any 6.0 ISO since the commit b0c8fc14f30792752cd49a2127ada79888d8b27a (circa October 2014) is affected.
I've found the issue with a locally built custom ISO, but the problem is generic, see https://review.openstack.org/138010 for more details.

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Reviewed: https://review.openstack.org/138010
Committed: https://git.openstack.org/cgit/stackforge/fuel-main/commit/?id=63882d87476a6bfff9d3ca21b4633115ba22baab
Submitter: Jenkins
Branch: master

commit 63882d87476a6bfff9d3ca21b4633115ba22baab
Author: Alexei Sheplyakov <email address hidden>
Date: Sun Nov 30 10:12:37 2014 +0300

    ubuntu: produce a valid Debian installer initrd.gz

    The code which applies initrd patch(es) produces a half-broken initrd which
    is a) not compressed, b) contains a chunk of itself. Fortunately the initrd
    is still able to boot, however, it's 2.5x larger than the original. This
    slows down the provisioning and puts an extra load on the master node.

    Closes-bug: #1397845
    blueprint support-ubuntu-trusty
    Change-Id: I666a4395e577b917016c2220a760a4cf340a54d2