Re: [yocto-autobuilder-helper][scarthgap][PATCH] config.json: Use buildtools on RHEL9 derivatives

On Wed, 2026-06-24 at 16:24 +0200, Yoann Congal wrote:
> From: Paul Barker <[email protected]>
> 
> tar 1.34 (and possibly earlier versions) is unable to extract tarballs
> containing read-only files with xattrs. This was fixed upstream, but
> it's unlikely at this point that the fix will be backported to RHEL9
> related distros (CentOS Stream 9, AlmaLinux 9, Rocky Linux 9). The issue
> affects these distros specifically because they have selinux enabled by
> default and this uses xattrs.
> 
> The specific failure we've seen is with the /usr/lib/udev/hwdb.bin file
> installed by the systemd recipe - this file is chmod 0444. This leads to
> the following error, typically during do_image_wic (shortened and split
> to make it readable):
> 
>     subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command
>     'tar --xattrs --xattrs-include='*' -cf - -S -C .../tmp/work/qemux86_64-poky-linux/core-image-minimal/1.0/rootfs -p . |
>     tar --xattrs --xattrs-include='*' -xf - -C .../tmp/work/qemux86_64-poky-linux/core-image-minimal/1.0/tmp-wic/rootfs2'
>     returned non-zero exit status 2.
> 
> To work around this, we will need to use the buildtools tarball on
> affected systems.
> 
> Fixes [YOCTO #16143].

I'm a little worried we missed a side effect of this change.

https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=bb7c445004f0706a96192d97bba1c8776595814b

means we do detect and warn users of the issue.

Unfortunately, buildtools has a lot more in than just tar and we're
effectively reducing the value of testing on those older systems by
using a full buildtools to work around an issue in a single one of
them.

I'm wondering if we should create a simpler "tar" buildtools tarball,
to ensure other issues don't creep in on RHEL9 derivatives?

Sadly, we're stuck with RHEL9 for a while yet, we still can't drop
RHEL8 :/

There is precedent for a single tool buildtools before when we had make
issues with ./meta/recipes-core/meta/buildtools-make-tarball.bb
(these days I'd class extend it!).

Cheers,

Richard