We learnt previously that an initramfs in Linux is a “CPIO archive”, so I set out to write something that can read and write them, in order to learn more about the format. What I found was an interesting discrepancy between how GNU cpio and the Linux Kernel parse CPIO files. It seems pretty innocuous, but I thought I’d document it for posterity.CPIO is an exceedingly simple format. At its heart, CPIO archives are a list of entries where each entry comprises a header, a file name, and the file da...