unmkinitramfs in initramfs-tools-core doesn't fully extract an initrd in bionic

Bug #1884079 reported by Hari Sundararajan
14
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
initramfs-tools (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I am running Ubuntu 18.04.4

I am looking at the initrd found in the desktop live cd (<cd loop mount>/casper/initrd). If you execute `binwalk initrd`, binwalk informs that the initrd file contains 2 cpio archives and a lzma archive

The first cpio archive is supposed to contain kernel/x86/microcode/AuthenticAMD.bin
The second cpio archive is supposed to contain kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin
The third file is a LZMA compressed data

Now, if you execute `unmkinitramfs <cd loop mount>/casper/initrd new-directory` , you will see 2 directories, "early" and "main".

"early" has the AuthenticAMD.bin, which means it corresponds to the first cpio.
"main" is the actual initial ram disk file system, which comes from the LZMA compressed data.

What I expect to see is also the GenuineIntel.bin firmware. `binwalk` says it's there, but `unmkinitramfs` is not able to extract it out. Why?

I see binwalk is at version 2.1.1-16, while initramfs-tools-core (which provides unmkinitramfs) is at version 0.130ubuntu3.9.

How do I extract the ubuntu 18 initramfs and get all the contents that binwalk is able to see?

Tags: initrd
summary: - unmkinitramfs in initramfs-tools-core doesn't fully extract an initrd
+ unmkinitramfs in initramfs-tools-core doesn't fully extract an initrd in
+ bionic
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in initramfs-tools (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
René Vögeli (rvoegeli) wrote :

Issue persists in Ubuntu 20.04. Images created with update-mkinitramfs and default configuration are not fully extracted by unmkinitramfs.

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