[rb-general] How to modify mount-time and write when you write in a file system

[Ximin Luo]

Andres Pavez:
> --
> Andrés Pavez
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 3:39 AM, Ximin Luo <infinity0 at debian.org> wrote:
>> Daniel Shahaf:
>>> Andres Pavez wrote on Tue, 11 Jul 2017 16:36 -0700:
>>>> Problem: during the creation/reproduction of the custom live cd, when
>>>> i use "mount' to mount the filesystem to copy my sw inside of the
>>>> rootfs (after unsquashfs) i noted usign tune2fs every time i mont the
>>>> file system the values "last mount time", "last write time" and
>>>> "Lifetime writes" changes and i don't know how to fix it.
>>>>
>>>> With tune2fs i can only  fix the "Mount Count", but no the mount time
>>>> and writes.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Perhaps, instead of backdating the metadata, teach diffoscope to parse
>>> the metadata, so diffoscope's output would pretty-print the metadata
>>> diff?  If it's just those three values that differ, presumably that wouldn't
>>> make the output much harder to audit for your downstream users.
>>>
>>
>> This approach, of adding exceptions to diffoscope and still calling the result "reproducible", isn't scalable (what if you need to put the result inside more containers?) So I wouldn't recommend this.
>>
>> @Andres: Have you tried `mount -o ro` to mount read-only? `man mount` also suggests some other options, in case that doesn't work:
>>
>> -r, --read-only
>>
>> Mount the filesystem read-only.  A synonym is -o ro.
>>
>> Note that, depending on the filesystem type, state and kernel behavior, the
>> system may still write to the device.  For example, ext3 and ext4 will replay
>> the journal if the filesystem is dirty.  To prevent this kind of write access,
>> you may want to mount an ext3 or ext4 filesystem with the ro,noload mount
>> options or set the block device itself to read-only mode, see the blockdev(8)
>> command.
> 
> Hi Ximin,
> Thanks for your comment. But i need to copy my sw inside of the ext4
> file system, so read only doesn't work.
> 
> [..]

You are extracting a squashfs container to a ext4 FS, adding extra files to it, and then expecting the ext4 block device to be reproducible when you do this twice?

Am I correct? If not, can you explain in more detail what you are actually doing?

Assuming I am correct, I don't think anyone has tried getting ext4 to work reproducibly after doing normal filesystem operations on it. It would be nice but nobody has looked into this unfortunately. I believe that squashfs "almost" works reproducibly, see https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/12032 but they have a few remaining issues, perhaps the TAILS folks can elaborate here. That is, you can try it with squashfs instead of ext4 and see what happens.

X

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