Bug#1125948: dracut: fails to detect 3cpio

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From	Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>
Newsgroups	linux.debian.bugs.dist, linux.debian.kernel
Subject	Bug#1125948: dracut: fails to detect 3cpio
Date	Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:30:01 +0100
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retitle 1125948 dracut: fails to detect 3cpio
thanks

On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 09:39:07PM +0100, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> [...]
> 
> Is the 3cpio --help call failing? If so, why?

Thanks a lot for this detailed explanation about how all this is (was)
supposed to work.

I'm doing a retitle to better reflect what we know about this failure.
(Based on your explanations, if the autodetection worked as designed
then there would be nothing wrong in calling "3cpio" as "3cpio").

This looks like some kind of race condition to me, similar to this one
which happened some time ago in the "sumo" package. This is the
message where Niels diagnosed the problem and solved the mystery:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1082135#19

With the sumo package in mind, I looked at the dracut script
to see if there was any occurrence of "&", and found that
there is a "parallel mode".

Can you tell if this parallel mode is the default, and if not, what
other reasons for a race condition can be?

I would be willing to build linux-signed-amd64 a lot of times using a
modified dracut package with whatever debug changes we could add to
see what's going on (even if they are simple "echo foo"), so I'm
open for suggestions about those potential changes.

Thanks.

Thread

Bug#1125948: dracut: Missing dependency on cpio (?) Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org> - 2026-01-23 21:50 +0100
  Bug#1125948: dracut: fails to detect 3cpio Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org> - 2026-01-24 14:30 +0100
    Bug#1125948: dracut: fails to detect 3cpio Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org> - 2026-01-24 15:20 +0100
      Bug#1125948: dracut: fails to detect 3cpio Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org> - 2026-01-24 17:40 +0100
        Bug#1125948: dracut: fails to detect 3cpio Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org> - 2026-01-24 19:30 +0100

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