How to burn Fedora DVDs to avoid readahead bug? (post-F7 update)

Andre Robatino andre at bwh.harvard.edu
Mon Jun 4 01:58:28 UTC 2007


  It appears that the F7 installer has been modified so that padding is 
no longer necessary for the discs to pass mediacheck.  I tested this 
with my old unpadded sets of CDs for Fedora 2 through 5.  On a machine 
with a DVD drive which is known vulnerable to the readahead bug, running 
the F7 installer, every one of these discs passes.  Running the FC6 
installer, or using the equivalent checkisomd5 from the anaconda-runtime 
package while running a fully updated FC6, at least half of the FC2 
discs fail (these were the first I checked so I didn't check the others).
  The fact that old discs now pass means that the change is probably in 
the installer itself.  It's unlikely that the readahead bug itself was 
fixed, though I can't confirm since the machine with the vulnerable DVD 
drive is still running FC6 (I was unable to install F7 on it).  I'm 
guessing that since mkisofs by default adds enough padding when creating 
an ISO to protect the included files, mediacheck was modified so that 
instead of checking the entire ISO, it only checks the part which 
includes the actual files, not the mkisofs-added padding at the end.  
Can anyone confirm this?




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