1. 03 4月, 2018 4 次提交
  2. 18 11月, 2017 1 次提交
  3. 02 11月, 2017 1 次提交
    • G
      License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license · b2441318
      Greg Kroah-Hartman 提交于
      Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which
      makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.
      
      By default all files without license information are under the default
      license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.
      
      Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0'
      SPDX license identifier.  The SPDX identifier is a legally binding
      shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.
      
      This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and
      Philippe Ombredanne.
      
      How this work was done:
      
      Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of
      the use cases:
       - file had no licensing information it it.
       - file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it,
       - file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information,
      
      Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases
      where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license
      had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords.
      
      The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to
      a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the
      output of two independent scanners (ScanCode & Windriver) producing SPDX
      tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne.  Philippe prepared the
      base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files.
      
      The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files
      assessed.  Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner
      results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s)
      to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not
      immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
      
      Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was:
       - Files considered eligible had to be source code files.
       - Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained >5
         lines of source
       - File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if <5
         lines).
      
      All documentation files were explicitly excluded.
      
      The following heuristics were used to determine which SPDX license
      identifiers to apply.
      
       - when both scanners couldn't find any license traces, file was
         considered to have no license information in it, and the top level
         COPYING file license applied.
      
         For non */uapi/* files that summary was:
      
         SPDX license identifier                            # files
         ---------------------------------------------------|-------
         GPL-2.0                                              11139
      
         and resulted in the first patch in this series.
      
         If that file was a */uapi/* path one, it was "GPL-2.0 WITH
         Linux-syscall-note" otherwise it was "GPL-2.0".  Results of that was:
      
         SPDX license identifier                            # files
         ---------------------------------------------------|-------
         GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        930
      
         and resulted in the second patch in this series.
      
       - if a file had some form of licensing information in it, and was one
         of the */uapi/* ones, it was denoted with the Linux-syscall-note if
         any GPL family license was found in the file or had no licensing in
         it (per prior point).  Results summary:
      
         SPDX license identifier                            # files
         ---------------------------------------------------|------
         GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note                       270
         GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      169
         ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause)    21
         ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    17
         LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      15
         GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       14
         ((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    5
         LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       4
         LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        3
         ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT)              3
         ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT)             1
      
         and that resulted in the third patch in this series.
      
       - when the two scanners agreed on the detected license(s), that became
         the concluded license(s).
      
       - when there was disagreement between the two scanners (one detected a
         license but the other didn't, or they both detected different
         licenses) a manual inspection of the file occurred.
      
       - In most cases a manual inspection of the information in the file
         resulted in a clear resolution of the license that should apply (and
         which scanner probably needed to revisit its heuristics).
      
       - When it was not immediately clear, the license identifier was
         confirmed with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
      
       - If there was any question as to the appropriate license identifier,
         the file was flagged for further research and to be revisited later
         in time.
      
      In total, over 70 hours of logged manual review was done on the
      spreadsheet to determine the SPDX license identifiers to apply to the
      source files by Kate, Philippe, Thomas and, in some cases, confirmation
      by lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
      
      Kate also obtained a third independent scan of the 4.13 code base from
      FOSSology, and compared selected files where the other two scanners
      disagreed against that SPDX file, to see if there was new insights.  The
      Windriver scanner is based on an older version of FOSSology in part, so
      they are related.
      
      Thomas did random spot checks in about 500 files from the spreadsheets
      for the uapi headers and agreed with SPDX license identifier in the
      files he inspected. For the non-uapi files Thomas did random spot checks
      in about 15000 files.
      
      In initial set of patches against 4.14-rc6, 3 files were found to have
      copy/paste license identifier errors, and have been fixed to reflect the
      correct identifier.
      
      Additionally Philippe spent 10 hours this week doing a detailed manual
      inspection and review of the 12,461 patched files from the initial patch
      version early this week with:
       - a full scancode scan run, collecting the matched texts, detected
         license ids and scores
       - reviewing anything where there was a license detected (about 500+
         files) to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct
       - reviewing anything where there was no detection but the patch license
         was not GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note to ensure that the applied
         SPDX license was correct
      
      This produced a worksheet with 20 files needing minor correction.  This
      worksheet was then exported into 3 different .csv files for the
      different types of files to be modified.
      
      These .csv files were then reviewed by Greg.  Thomas wrote a script to
      parse the csv files and add the proper SPDX tag to the file, in the
      format that the file expected.  This script was further refined by Greg
      based on the output to detect more types of files automatically and to
      distinguish between header and source .c files (which need different
      comment types.)  Finally Greg ran the script using the .csv files to
      generate the patches.
      Reviewed-by: NKate Stewart <kstewart@linuxfoundation.org>
      Reviewed-by: NPhilippe Ombredanne <pombredanne@nexb.com>
      Reviewed-by: NThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
      Signed-off-by: NGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
      b2441318
  4. 04 9月, 2017 1 次提交
  5. 09 5月, 2017 2 次提交
  6. 07 5月, 2017 1 次提交
    • L
      initramfs: avoid "label at end of compound statement" error · 394e4f5d
      Linus Torvalds 提交于
      Commit 17a9be31 ("initramfs: Always do fput() and load modules after
      rootfs populate") introduced an error for the
      
          CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
      
      case, because even though the code looks fine, the compiler really wants
      a statement after a label, or you'll get complaints:
      
        init/initramfs.c: In function 'populate_rootfs':
        init/initramfs.c:644:2: error: label at end of compound statement
      
      That commit moved the subsequent statements to outside the compound
      statement, leaving the label without any associated statements.
      Reported-by: NJörg Otte <jrg.otte@gmail.com>
      Fixes: 17a9be31 ("initramfs: Always do fput() and load modules after rootfs populate")
      Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
      Cc: Stafford Horne <shorne@gmail.com>
      Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org  # if 17a9be31 gets backported
      Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      394e4f5d
  7. 05 5月, 2017 1 次提交
    • S
      initramfs: Always do fput() and load modules after rootfs populate · 17a9be31
      Stafford Horne 提交于
      In OpenRISC we do not have a bootloader passed initrd, but the built in
      initramfs does contain the /init and other binaries, including modules.
      The previous commit 08865514 ("initramfs: finish fput() before
      accessing any binary from initramfs") made a change to only call fput()
      if the bootloader initrd was available, this caused intermittent crashes
      for OpenRISC.
      
      This patch changes the fput() to happen unconditionally if any rootfs is
      loaded. Also, I added some comments to make it a bit more clear why we
      call unpack_to_rootfs() multiple times.
      
      Fixes: 08865514 ("initramfs: finish fput() before accessing any binary from initramfs")
      Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
      Cc: Lokesh Vutla <lokeshvutla@ti.com>
      Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
      Acked-by: NAl Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
      Signed-off-by: NStafford Horne <shorne@gmail.com>
      17a9be31
  8. 28 2月, 2017 1 次提交
  9. 11 9月, 2015 1 次提交
    • D
      kexec: split kexec_load syscall from kexec core code · 2965faa5
      Dave Young 提交于
      There are two kexec load syscalls, kexec_load another and kexec_file_load.
       kexec_file_load has been splited as kernel/kexec_file.c.  In this patch I
      split kexec_load syscall code to kernel/kexec.c.
      
      And add a new kconfig option KEXEC_CORE, so we can disable kexec_load and
      use kexec_file_load only, or vice verse.
      
      The original requirement is from Ted Ts'o, he want kexec kernel signature
      being checked with CONFIG_KEXEC_VERIFY_SIG enabled.  But kexec-tools use
      kexec_load syscall can bypass the checking.
      
      Vivek Goyal proposed to create a common kconfig option so user can compile
      in only one syscall for loading kexec kernel.  KEXEC/KEXEC_FILE selects
      KEXEC_CORE so that old config files still work.
      
      Because there's general code need CONFIG_KEXEC_CORE, so I updated all the
      architecture Kconfig with a new option KEXEC_CORE, and let KEXEC selects
      KEXEC_CORE in arch Kconfig.  Also updated general kernel code with to
      kexec_load syscall.
      
      [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
      Signed-off-by: NDave Young <dyoung@redhat.com>
      Cc: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
      Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
      Cc: Petr Tesarik <ptesarik@suse.cz>
      Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
      Cc: Josh Boyer <jwboyer@fedoraproject.org>
      Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
      Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
      Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
      Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      2965faa5
  10. 14 10月, 2014 1 次提交
  11. 09 8月, 2014 3 次提交
    • D
      initramfs: add write error checks · 9687fd91
      David Engraf 提交于
      On a system with low memory extracting the initramfs may fail.  If this
      happens the user gets "Failed to execute /init" instead of an initramfs
      error.
      
      Check return value of sys_write and call error() when the write was
      incomplete or failed.
      Signed-off-by: NDavid Engraf <david.engraf@sysgo.com>
      Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
      Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      9687fd91
    • Y
      initramfs: support initramfs that is bigger than 2GiB · d97b07c5
      Yinghai Lu 提交于
      Now with 64bit bzImage and kexec tools, we support ramdisk that size is
      bigger than 2g, as we could put it above 4G.
      
      Found compressed initramfs image could not be decompressed properly.  It
      turns out that image length is int during decompress detection, and it
      will become < 0 when length is more than 2G.  Furthermore, during
      decompressing len as int is used for inbuf count, that has problem too.
      
      Change len to long, that should be ok as on 32 bit platform long is
      32bits.
      
      Tested with following compressed initramfs image as root with kexec.
      	gzip, bzip2, xz, lzma, lzop, lz4.
      run time for populate_rootfs():
         size        name       Nehalem-EX  Westmere-EX  Ivybridge-EX
       9034400256 root_img     :   26s           24s          30s
       3561095057 root_img.lz4 :   28s           27s          27s
       3459554629 root_img.lzo :   29s           29s          28s
       3219399480 root_img.gz  :   64s           62s          49s
       2251594592 root_img.xz  :  262s          260s         183s
       2226366598 root_img.lzma:  386s          376s         277s
       2901482513 root_img.bz2 :  635s          599s
      Signed-off-by: NYinghai Lu <yinghai@kernel.org>
      Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
      Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
      Cc: Rashika Kheria <rashika.kheria@gmail.com>
      Cc: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
      Cc: Kyungsik Lee <kyungsik.lee@lge.com>
      Cc: P J P <ppandit@redhat.com>
      Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
      Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp>
      Cc: "Daniel M. Weeks" <dan@danweeks.net>
      Cc: Alexandre Courbot <acourbot@nvidia.com>
      Cc: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@suse.com>
      Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
      Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      d97b07c5
    • Y
      initramfs: support initrd that is bigger than 2GiB · 38747439
      Yinghai Lu 提交于
      When initrd (compressed or not) is used, kernel report data corrupted with
      /dev/ram0.
      
      The root cause:
      During initramfs checking, if it is initrd, it will be transferred to
      /initrd.image with sys_write.
      sys_write only support 2G-4K write, so if the initrd ram is more than
      that, /initrd.image will not complete at all.
      
      Add local xwrite to loop calling sys_write to workaround the problem.
      
      Also need to use xwrite in write_buffer() to handle:
      image is uncompressed cpio and there is one big file (>2G) in it.
         unpack_to_rootfs ===> write_buffer ===> actions[]/do_copy
      
      At the same time, we don't need to worry about sys_read/sys_write in
      do_mounts_rd.c::crd_load.  As decompressor will have fill/flush and local
      buffer that is smaller than 2G.
      
      Test with uncompressed initrd, and compressed ones with gz, bz2, lzma,xz,
      lzop.
      Signed-off-by: NYinghai Lu <yinghai@kernel.org>
      Acked-by: NH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
      Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
      Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
      Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp>
      Cc: "Daniel M. Weeks" <dan@danweeks.net>
      Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
      Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      38747439
  12. 08 4月, 2014 1 次提交
  13. 24 1月, 2014 1 次提交
  14. 19 1月, 2013 1 次提交
    • T
      init, block: try to load default elevator module early during boot · bb813f4c
      Tejun Heo 提交于
      This patch adds default module loading and uses it to load the default
      block elevator.  During boot, it's called right after initramfs or
      initrd is made available and right before control is passed to
      userland.  This ensures that as long as the modules are available in
      the usual places in initramfs, initrd or the root filesystem, the
      default modules are loaded as soon as possible.
      
      This will replace the on-demand elevator module loading from elevator
      init path.
      
      v2: Fixed build breakage when !CONFIG_BLOCK.  Reported by kbuild test
          robot.
      Signed-off-by: NTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
      Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
      Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
      Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      Cc: Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com>
      Cc: Fengguang We <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
      bb813f4c
  15. 01 6月, 2012 1 次提交
  16. 04 1月, 2012 1 次提交
  17. 27 10月, 2010 1 次提交
  18. 29 9月, 2010 1 次提交
    • H
      initramfs: fix initramfs size calculation · ffe8018c
      Hendrik Brueckner 提交于
      The size of a built-in initramfs is calculated in init/initramfs.c by
      "__initramfs_end - __initramfs_start".  Those symbols are defined in the
      linker script include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h:
      
      #define INIT_RAM_FS                                                     \
              . = ALIGN(PAGE_SIZE);                                           \
              VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__initramfs_start) = .;                          \
              *(.init.ramfs)                                                  \
              VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__initramfs_end) = .;
      
      If the initramfs file has an odd number of bytes, the "__initramfs_end"
      symbol points to an odd address, for example, the symbols in the
      System.map might look like:
      
          0000000000572000 T __initramfs_start
          00000000005bcd05 T __initramfs_end	  <-- odd address
      
      At least on s390 this causes a problem:
      
      Certain s390 instructions, especially instructions for loading addresses
      (larl) or branch addresses must be on even addresses.  The compiler loads
      the symbol addresses with the "larl" instruction.  This instruction sets
      the last bit to 0 and, therefore, for odd size files, the calculated size
      is one byte less than it should be:
      
          0000000000540a9c <populate_rootfs>:
            540a9c:     eb cf f0 78 00 24       stmg    %r12,%r15,120(%r15),
            540aa2:     c0 10 00 01 8a af       larl    %r1,572000 <__initramfs_start>
            540aa8:     c0 c0 00 03 e1 2e       larl    %r12,5bcd04 <initramfs_end>
                                                        (Instead of  5bcd05)
            ...
            540abe:     1b c1                   sr      %r12,%r1
      
      To fix the problem, this patch introduces the global variable
      __initramfs_size, which is calculated in the "usr/initramfs_data.S" file.
      The populate_rootfs() function can then use the start marker of the
      .init.ramfs section and the value of __initramfs_size for loading the
      initramfs.  Because the start marker and size is sufficient, the
      __initramfs_end symbol is no longer needed and is removed.
      Signed-off-by: NMichael Holzheu <holzheu@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
      Signed-off-by: NHendrik Brueckner <brueckner@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
      Reviewed-by: NWANG Cong <xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com>
      Acked-by: NMichal Marek <mmarek@suse.cz>
      Acked-by: N"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
      Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
      Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
      Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
      Signed-off-by: NMichal Marek <mmarek@suse.cz>
      ffe8018c
  19. 25 4月, 2010 1 次提交
  20. 07 3月, 2010 1 次提交
  21. 16 12月, 2009 1 次提交
  22. 07 5月, 2009 1 次提交
  23. 14 4月, 2009 2 次提交
  24. 03 4月, 2009 1 次提交
  25. 29 3月, 2009 1 次提交
  26. 15 1月, 2009 1 次提交
    • H
      init: make initrd/initramfs decompression failure a KERN_EMERG event · 73310a16
      H. Peter Anvin 提交于
      Impact: More consistent behaviour, avoid policy in the kernel
      
      Upgrade/downgrade initrd/initramfs decompression failure from
      inconsistently a panic or a KERN_ALERT message to a KERN_EMERG event.
      It is, however, possible do design a system which can recover from
      this (using the kernel builtin code and/or the internal initramfs),
      which means this is policy, not a technical necessity.
      
      A good way to handle this would be to have a panic-level=X option, to
      force a panic on a printk above a certain level.  That is a separate
      patch, however.
      Signed-off-by: NH. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
      73310a16
  27. 13 1月, 2009 1 次提交
  28. 10 1月, 2009 1 次提交
    • I
      bzip2/lzma: make flush_buffer() unconditional · 736f9323
      Ingo Molnar 提交于
      Impact: build fix
      
      flush_buffer() is used unconditionally:
      
        init/initramfs.c:456: error: 'flush_buffer' undeclared (first use in this function)
        init/initramfs.c:456: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
        init/initramfs.c:456: error: for each function it appears in.)
      
      So remove the decompressor #ifdefs from around it.
      Signed-off-by: NIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
      736f9323
  29. 09 1月, 2009 1 次提交
  30. 08 1月, 2009 1 次提交
    • D
      NOMMU: Support XIP on initramfs · cb6ff208
      David Howells 提交于
      Support XIP on files unpacked from the initramfs image on NOMMU systems.  This
      simply requires the length of the file to be preset so that the ramfs fs can
      attempt to garner sufficient contiguous storage to store the file (NOMMU mmap
      can only map contiguous RAM).
      
      All the other bits to do XIP on initramfs files are present:
      
       (1) ramfs's truncate attempts to allocate a contiguous run of pages when a
           file is truncated upwards from nothing.
      
       (2) ramfs sets BDI on its files to indicate direct mapping is possible, and
           that its files can be mapped for read, write and exec.
      
       (3) NOMMU mmap() will use the above bits to determine that it can do XIP.
           Possibly this needs better controls, because it will _always_ try and do
           XIP.
      
      One disadvantage of this very simplistic approach is that sufficient space
      will be allocated to store the whole file, and not just the bit that would be
      XIP'd.  To deal with this, though, the initramfs unpacker would have to be
      able to parse the file contents.
      Signed-off-by: NDavid Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
      Acked-by: NPaul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
      cb6ff208
  31. 07 1月, 2009 1 次提交
    • A
      bzip2/lzma: fix built-in initramfs vs CONFIG_RD_GZIP · a26ee60f
      Alain Knaff 提交于
      Impact: Resolves build failures in some configurations
      
      Makes it possible to disable CONFIG_RD_GZIP . In that case, the
      built-in initramfs will be compressed by whatever compressor is
      available (bzip2 or lzma) or left uncompressed if none is available.
      
      It also removes a couple of warnings which occur when no ramdisk
      compression at all is chosen.
      
      It also restores the select ZLIB_INFLATE in drivers/block/Kconfig
      which somehow came missing. This is needed to activate compilation of
      the stuff in zlib_deflate.
      Signed-off-by: NAlain Knaff <alain@knaff.lu>
      Signed-off-by: NH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
      a26ee60f
  32. 05 1月, 2009 1 次提交
    • A
      bzip2/lzma: config and initramfs support for bzip2/lzma decompression · 30d65dbf
      Alain Knaff 提交于
      Impact: New code for initramfs decompression, new features
      
      This is the second part of the bzip2/lzma patch
      
      The bzip patch is based on an idea by Christian Ludwig, includes support for
      compressing the kernel with bzip2 or lzma rather than gzip. Both
      compressors give smaller sizes than gzip.  Lzma's decompresses faster
      than bzip2.
      
      It also supports ramdisks and initramfs' compressed using these two
      compressors.
      
      The functionality has been successfully used for a couple of years by
      the udpcast project
      
      This version applies to "tip" kernel 2.6.28
      
      This part contains:
      - support for new compressions (bzip2 and lzma) in initramfs and
      old-style ramdisk
      - config dialog for kernel compression (but new kernel compressions
      not yet supported)
      Signed-off-by: NAlain Knaff <alain@knaff.lu>
      Signed-off-by: NH. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
      30d65dbf
  33. 17 10月, 2008 1 次提交
    • N
      initramfs: add option to preserve mtime from initramfs cpio images · 889d51a1
      Nye Liu 提交于
      When unpacking the cpio into the initramfs, mtimes are not preserved by
      default.  This patch adds an INITRAMFS_PRESERVE_MTIME option that allows
      mtimes stored in the cpio image to be used when constructing the
      initramfs.
      
      For embedded applications that run exclusively out of the initramfs, this
      is invaluable:
      
      When building embedded application initramfs images, its nice to know when
      the files were actually created during the build process - that makes it
      easier to see what files were modified when so we can compare the files
      that are being used on the image with the files used during the build
      process.  This might help (for example) to determine if the target system
      has all the updated files you expect to see w/o having to check MD5s etc.
      
      In our environment, the whole system runs off the initramfs partition, and
      seeing the modified times of the shared libraries (for example) helps us
      find bugs that may have been introduced by the build system incorrectly
      propogating outdated shared libraries into the image.
      
      Similarly, many of the initializion/configuration files in /etc might be
      dynamically built by the build system, and knowing when they were modified
      helps us sanity check whether the target system has the "latest" files
      etc.
      
      Finally, we might use last modified times to determine whether a hot fix
      should be applied or not to the running ramfs.
      Signed-off-by: NNye Liu <nyet@nyet.org>
      Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
      Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
      Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      889d51a1