Debian Bug report logs - #725729
abootimg: will produce non-functional images on a big-endian machine

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie@collabora.co.uk>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: abootimg: will produce non-functional images on a big-endian machine

Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 19:52:42 +0100

Package: abootimg
Version: 0.6-1
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream

By inspection of its source code, abootimg has the same bug as Android
mkbootimg: because it writes host structs directly into the file,
if the size or endianness of any of the integers in those structs does
not match the expected size/endianness (4-byte int, little-endian),
the image will be misinterpreted by the Android device.

Another possibility would be to only build abootimg on little-endian
platforms (any-i386, any-amd64, armel, armhf, mipsel etc., but not
powerpc).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers proposed-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.10-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Message #10 received at 725729@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Gilles Grandou <gilles@grandou.net>

To: Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie@collabora.co.uk>, 725729@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#725729: abootimg: will produce non-functional images on a big-endian machine

Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 17:57:25 +0100

On 07/10/2013 20:52, Simon McVittie wrote:
> Package: abootimg
> Version: 0.6-1
> Severity: normal
> Tags: upstream
>
> By inspection of its source code, abootimg has the same bug as Android
> mkbootimg: because it writes host structs directly into the file,
> if the size or endianness of any of the integers in those structs does
> not match the expected size/endianness (4-byte int, little-endian),
> the image will be misinterpreted by the Android device.

I agree, but as I don't have any big-endian system under my hand, I 
won't be able to test it. Patches are welcome ;)

> Another possibility would be to only build abootimg on little-endian
> platforms (any-i386, any-amd64, armel, armhf, mipsel etc., but not
> powerpc).

It would make sense. I don't see any usage case where you would like to 
manipulate Android boot image from a bigendian host...

Thanks,
Gilles.

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