Arch Linux

Yes, I investigated that already. It seems that init overwrites its cmdline with a new string. However, now that we stopped passing unnecessary (and wrong) options, the memory for that is too short. Why it only fits three characters in there is a mystery to me though, the strings should be longer.

i still see this with kernel2.6.31.4-1, klibc 1.5.15-3, mkinitcpio 0.5.26-1

Hm, I think I know how to "fix" it, but it's not really worth the effort, as rebuilding klibc against a new kernel is always a PITA (it seems to be okay this time, but we'll have to see). I thought I would have switched to uclibc by now and left klibc/kinit behind, but it seems that didn't happen, as creating the necessary tools is not as flawless as I would have wished.

What happens is the following: We pass no options at all to init by default. That means klibc calls /sbin/init with argc=1 and argv="init\0" (note that the array is allocated on the stack as continuous memory). If we were to pass "3" as an argument, this would be argv="init\03\0". Now, what I suspect to be an off-by-one error in sysvinit causes init to overwrite this by "ini\0\0". If we would change the command line to "/sbin/init\0" in kinit, then init would be able to write "init [5]\0\0\0" as it wants to.

Okay, this should be fixed in testing, at least it works here.

I cannot rebuild a working version of klibc against 2.6.31 on i686, and upstream is dead. I will hopefully get to dumping klibc for good.