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Add "GPTar update" article
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articles/gptar-update.md
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articles/gptar-update.md
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---
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title: GPTar (update)
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date: 2024-10-28
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description: libarchive vs hybrid GUID partition table and GNU tar volume header
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---
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In a [previous post][gptar-post] I describe how I craft a hybrid GUID partition table (GPT) and tar archive by exploiting that there are disjoint areas of a 512 byte *block* that are important to tar headers and *protective* master boot records used in GPT respectively.
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I recommend reading it first if you haven't already for context.
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After writing the above post I read an excellent and fun *and totally normal* article by Emily on how [she created **executable** tar archives][tar-executable].
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Therein I learned a clever hack:
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GNU tar has a tar extension for *volume headers*.
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These are essentially labels for your tape archives when you're forced to split an archive across multiple tapes.
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They can (seemingly) hold any text as label including shell scripts.
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What's more is GNU tar and bsdtar **does not** extract these as files!
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This is excellent, because I don't actually want to extract or list the GPT header when using GNU tar or bsdtar.
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This prompted me to [use a different link indicator](https://github.com/reynir/gptar/pull/1).
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This worked pretty great.
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Listing the archive using GNU tar I still get `GPTAR`, but with verbose listing it's displayed as a `--Volume Header--`:
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```
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$ tar -tvf disk.img
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Vr-------- 0/0 16896 1970-01-01 01:00 GPTAR--Volume Header--
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-rw-r--r-- 0/0 14 1970-01-01 01:00 test.txt
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```
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And more importantly the `GPTAR` entry is ignored when extracting:
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```
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$ mkdir tmp
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$ cd tmp/
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$ tar -xf ../disk.img
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$ ls
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test.txt
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```
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## BSD tar / libarchive
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Unfortunately, this broke bsdtar!
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```
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$ bsdtar -tf disk.img
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bsdtar: Damaged tar archive
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bsdtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
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```
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This is annoying because we run FreeBSD on the host for [opam.robur.coop](https://opam.robur.coop), our instance of [opam-mirror][opam-mirror].
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This Autumn we updated [opam-mirror][opam-mirror] to use the hybrid GPT+tar GPTar *tartition table*[^tartition] instead of hard coded or boot parameter specified disk offsets for the different partitions - which was extremely brittle!
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So we were no longer able to inspect the contents of the tar partition from the host!
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Unacceptable!
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So I started to dig into libarchive where bsdtar comes from.
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To my surprise, after building bsdtar from the git clone of the source code it ran perfectly fine!
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```
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$ ./bsdtar -tf ../gptar/disk.img
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test.txt
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```
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I eventually figure out [this change][libarchive-pr] fixed it for me.
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I got in touch with Emily to let her know that bsdtar recently fixed this (ab)use of GNU volume headers.
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Her reply was basically "as of when I wrote the article, I was pretty sure bsdtar ignored it."
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And indeed it did.
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Examining the diff further revealed that it ignored the GNU volume header - just not "correctly" when the GNU volume header was abused to carry file content as I did:
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```diff
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/*
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* Interpret 'V' GNU tar volume header.
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*/
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static int
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header_volume(struct archive_read *a, struct tar *tar,
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struct archive_entry *entry, const void *h, size_t *unconsumed)
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{
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- (void)h;
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+ const struct archive_entry_header_ustar *header;
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+ int64_t size, to_consume;
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+
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+ (void)a; /* UNUSED */
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+ (void)tar; /* UNUSED */
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+ (void)entry; /* UNUSED */
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- /* Just skip this and read the next header. */
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- return (tar_read_header(a, tar, entry, unconsumed));
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+ header = (const struct archive_entry_header_ustar *)h;
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+ size = tar_atol(header->size, sizeof(header->size));
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+ to_consume = ((size + 511) & ~511);
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+ *unconsumed += to_consume;
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+ return (ARCHIVE_OK);
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}
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```
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So thanks to the above change we can expect a release of libarchive supporting further flavors of abuse of GNU volume headers!
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🥳
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[gptar-post]: gptar.html
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[tar-executable]: https://uni.horse/executable-tarballs.html
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[opam-mirror]: https://git.robur.coop/robur/opam-mirror/
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[libarchive-pr]: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/2127
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[^tartition]: Emily came up with the much better term "tartition table" than what I had come up with - "GPTar".
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