Hi,
Our builds are done on a pool of RHEL 6.6 x86_64 machines on which cpio 2.10-12 is installed. The builds build a Linux root filesystem like so:
find . | fakeroot cpio -H new -o | xz ...
This works most of the time, but when run on specific machines in the pool, all hardlinked regular files within the directory being archived are zero length in the archive. The files are still hardlinked but the contents are gone.
An md5sum on the /bin/cpio binaries shows that they are different, but this must be because of prelinking and address randomization.
I suspect a bug in cpio, but can't rule out a bug in fakeroot or something else. I did try building cpio 2.12 from source and using that, and that does seem to have made the problem go away, but without knowing what the root cause was, I can't really be sure it won't come back.
Any idea what might be causing this?
Thanks,
Doug