Analysing differences in images produced with mkimg and makefs

[Fabian Keil]

"Chris Lamb" <chris at reproducible-builds.org> wrote on 2021-12-08 at 01:21:03:

> >>   $ virt-list-filesystems FreeBSD-12.3-STABLE-amd64-20211125-r371091-mini-memstick.img
> >>   list_filesystems: sfdisk exited with status 1: sfdisk: /dev/sda: partition 5: partition table contains only 4 partitions at /usr/bin/virt-list-filesystems line 166.
> [..]
> > I suspect that virt-list-partitions gets the "partition" count wrong.
[...]
> > The following FreeBSD commit seems relevant:
> > <https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=334337>
> >
> > I suspect the images now contain some "compatibility goo" so
> > old BIOSes are able to boot from them and it seems conceivable
> > that the guestfs tools behave similar to an old BIOS and thus
> > don't "see" the real disk layout.
> 
> From some experience when doing other ISO/USB stick stuff in the past,
> your "compatibility goo" theory around slices vs partitions sounds
> more than credible.
> 
> Unfortunately, though, partition and booting blah is not quite my
> technical area. I wonder what the next best step is here: getting in
> touch with the libguestfs folks?

Unfortunately I'm not sure either.

I'm not familiar with the libguestfs project at all and
still haven't checked if their tools even build on FreeBSD
and thus ElectroBSD.

If their tools aren't supposed to be portable anyway,
which seems conceivable to me, contacting them because
of a BSD-specific issue may be a waste of time for all
parties involved.

Fabian
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