[Reproducible-builds] Bug#759514: grub-pc-bin: ELF ABI number varies by build architecture

[Steven Chamberlain]

Package: grub-pc-bin
Version: 1.99-27+deb7u2
Severity: wishlist
User: reproducible-builds at lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: toolchain
User: debian-bsd at lists.debian.org
Usertags: kfreebsd
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-bsd at lists.debian.org

Hi,

grub-pc-bin is built on linux-any and kfreebsd-any.  The produced GRUB
image and modules should ideally be the same in each case.  (Because
GRUB is a kernel in its own right.)

We already build the same set of modules, so that people can dual-boot
linux and kfreebsd on the same machine.

The most obvious difference is the ELF ABI number of the output files,
something that will be ignored anyway:

> $ file a/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/kernel.img
> a/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/kernel.img: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped

> $ file b/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/kernel.img
> b/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/kernel.img: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), statically linked, stripped

On kfreebsd, we could fix it by post-processing with elfedit.  I propose
to do that during the package build.  After that, this file is the same
as generated by linux (for this particular GRUB build).

Likewise for the *.mod files;  165 out of 192 of them were identical
after this simple change.

The motivation of this is to demonstrate integrity of the build, by very
different systems, and check the reliability of their toolchains.

Thanks,
Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven at pyro.eu.org


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