binutils 2.34 on NixOS

[Bernardo Meurer]

Hey Nick,

> Does this mean that the latest binutils are actually behaving correctly
> and that it is the older binutils which were wrong ?  (In which case this
> is kind of a non-issue, although I am sure that it would be interesting
> to know what changed/was fixed in the binutils to expose this problem in
> the coreutils testsuite).
I believe so, yes. In these last few days we were able to solve the
issue[1] after someone pointed out that with binutils >2.31.1 coreutils'
`mknod` no longer worked in a chroot[2]. There even is a Fedora patch[3]
solving this same issue[4].
The patch simply adds `export ac_cv_func_lchmod="no"` to the coreutils
build, which seemingly resolves the issue and makes mknod work again
inside a chroot without /proc mounted.
Even though we've fixed the issue with that I'm still not clear on how
are all these things connected, why did a change in binutils trigger this?

Cheers,
Bernardo.

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/85951
[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/85951#issuecomment-619601978
[3]:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/coreutils/c/acfa9e81ec1baeea27c2c12f04b5b56c260a3af7?branch=master
[4]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1811038

On 4/27/20 4:32 AM, Nick Clifton wrote:
> Hi Bernardo,
>
>>> In the case of coreutils' |tests/cp/parent-perm-race|, it tries to
>>> |chmod g+s| a directory, which is disallowed by the seccomp configured
>>> inside the first part of the linked code.
>>>
>> >From this it seems like these tests were never supposed to pass anyway,
>> and that they did was a bug. Did something change in the 2.31<->2.33.1 version
>> span that could be the cause of this?
> Does this mean that the latest binutils are actually behaving correctly
> and that it is the older binutils which were wrong ?  (In which case this
> is kind of a non-issue, although I am sure that it would be interesting
> to know what changed/was fixed in the binutils to expose this problem in
> the coreutils testsuite).
>
> Cheers
>   Nick
>
>