Extracting multi-layered initramfs

Modern Kernel specification (can be seen here) defined the initial ramdisk (initrd or initramfs, depends on who you ask) to allow stacking of compressed or uncompressed CPIO archives. It means, in fact, that you can extend your current initramfs by appending a cpio.gz (or cpio) file at the end, containing the additions or changes to the filesystem (be it directories, files, links and anything else you can think about).

An example of this action:

mkdir /tmp/test
cd /tmp/test
tar -C /home/ezaton/test123 -cf - . | tar xf - # Clones the contests of /home/ezaton/test123 to this location
find ./ | cpio -o -H newc > ../test.cpio.gz # Creates a compressed CPIO file
cat ../test.cpio.gz >> /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img

This should work (I haven’t tried, and if you do it – make sure you have a copy of the original initramfs file!), and the contents of the directory /tmp/test would be reflected in the initramfs.

This method allows us to quickly modify existing ramdisk, replacing files (the stacked cpio files are extracted by order), and practically – doing allot of neat tricks.

The trickier question, however, is how to extract the stacked CPIO files.
If you create a file containing multiple cpio.gz files, appended, and just try to extract them, only the contents of the first CPIO file would be extracted.

The Kernel can do it, and so are we. The basic concept we need to understand is that GZIP compresses a stream. It means that there is no difference between a file structured of stacked CPIO files, and then compressed altogether, or a file constructed by appending cpio.gz files. The result would be similar, and so is the handling of the file. It also means that we do not need to run a loop of zcat/un-cpio and then again zcat/un-cpio on the file chunk by chunk, but when we decompress the file, we decompress it in whole.

Let’s create an example file:

cd /tmp 
for i in {1..10} ; do
    mkdir test${i}
    touch test${i}/test${i}-file
    find ./test${i} | cpio -o -H newc | gzip > test${i}.cpio.gz
    cat test${i}.cpio.gz >> test-of-all.cpio.gz 
done 

This script will create ten directories called test1 to test10, each containing a single file called test<number>-file. Each of them will both be archived into a dedicated cpio.gz file (named the same) and appended to a larger file called test-of-all.cpio.gz

If we run the following script to extract the contents, we will get only the first CPIO contents:

mkdir /tmp/extract
cd /tmp/extract
zcat ../test-of-all.cpio.gz | cpio -id # Format is newc, but it is auto detected

The resulting would be the directory ‘test1’ with a single file in it, but with nothing else. The trick to extract all files would be to run the following command:

rm -Rf /tmp/extract # Cleanup
mkdir /tmp/extract
cd /tmp/extract
zcat ../test-of-all.cpio.gz | while cpio -id ; do : ; done

This will extract all files, until there is no more cpio format remaining. Then the ‘cpio’ command will fail and the loop would end.

Some additional notes:
The ‘:’ is a place holder (does nothing) because ‘while’ loop requires a command. It is a legitimate command in shell.

So – now you can extract even complex CPIO structures, such as can be found in older Foreman “Discovery Image” (very old implementation), Tiny Core Linux (see this forum post, and this wiki note as reference on where this stacking is invoked) and more. This said, for extracting Centos/RHEL7 initramfs, which is structured of uncompressed CPIO appended by a cpio.gz file, a different command is required, and a post about it (works for Ubuntu and RHEL) can be found here.

EDIT: It seems the kernel-integrated CPIO extracting method will not “overwrite” a file with a later layer of cpio.gz contents, so I will have to investigate a different approach to that. FYI.