Hi all, We're currently trying to clean up our build processes to make sure that all binary output is reproducible (along the lines of https://reproducible-builds.org/). A few of our build artifacts are filesystem images. We have VFAT and XFS images. They represent the system updates for units in the field and at developers' desks. We're trying to make these images reproducible and I'm in need of some help. As far as I can tell, one of the biggest culprits is VFAT's "creation time" and XFS' ctime fields. Example of VFAT's differences: $ hexdump -C ~/swu-tests/swu1/dvt-controller-kernel.vfat > ~/swu-tests/swu1/dvt-controller-kernel.vfat.dump $ hexdump -C ~/swu-tests/swu3/dvt-controller-kernel.vfat > ~/swu-tests/swu3/dvt-controller-kernel.vfat.dump $ diff -u ~/swu-tests/swu1/dvt-controller-kernel.vfat.dump ~/swu-tests/swu3/dvt-controller-kernel.vfat.dump --- /x1/home/philipp/swu-tests/swu1/dvt-controller-kernel.vfat.dump 2017-12-28 12:19:57.349880993 -0800 +++ /x1/home/philipp/swu-tests/swu3/dvt-controller-kernel.vfat.dump 2017-12-28 12:19:50.253881196 -0800 ... @@ -1011,13 +1011,13 @@ * 00006200 41 7a 00 49 00 6d 00 61 00 67 00 0f 00 7c 65 00 |Az.I.m.a.g...|e.| 00006210 00 00 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff 00 00 ff ff ff ff |................| -00006220 5a 49 4d 41 47 45 20 20 20 20 20 20 00 00 63 9b |ZIMAGE ..c.| +00006220 5a 49 4d 41 47 45 20 20 20 20 20 20 00 64 d8 95 |ZIMAGE .d..| 00006230 9c 4b 9c 4b 00 00 00 00 21 00 03 00 a0 2d 4a 00 |.K.K....!....-J.| 00006240 42 6f 00 6c 00 6c 00 65 00 72 00 0f 00 67 2d 00 |Bo.l.l.e.r...g-.| 00006250 64 00 76 00 74 00 2e 00 64 00 00 00 74 00 62 00 |d.v.t...d...t.b.| ... As per the structure, that's the ctime (creation time) being different. https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/vfat.txt I've not had much luck digging into the XFS spec to see prove that the ctime is different, but I'm pretty certain. When I mount the images, I can see that ctime is different: $ stat -c %x,%y,%z,%n /mnt/{a,b}/log/syslog 2017-12-28 11:26:53.552000096 -0800,1969-12-31 16:00:00.000000000 -0800,2017-12-28 11:28:50.524000060 -0800,/mnt/a/log/syslog 2017-12-28 10:46:38.739999913 -0800,1969-12-31 16:00:00.000000000 -0800,2017-12-28 10:48:17.180000049 -0800,/mnt/b/log/syslog As far as I can tell, there are no mount options to null out the ctime fields. (As an aside I'm curious as to the reason for this). Is there a tool that lets me null out ctime fields on a XFS filesystem image? Or maybe is there a library that lets me traverse the file system and set the fields to zero manually? Does what I'm asking make sense? I feel like I'm not the first person to tackle this, but I haven't been lucky with finding anything to address this. Thanks, Phil -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-xfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
