CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

v1.14.2

• New features

  • Support setting the core file pattern early in the boot process to enabling capturing core files from beam.smp startup. See --core-pattern.

• Bug fixes

  • Fix parse issue when looking for file systems to unmount. Previously if file system options for longer than 127 characters, there'd be a harmless parse error. It was harmless since it just resulted in an ignored error and everything that was supposed to be unmounted was. It was just distracting to see in the logs.

v1.14.1

• Bug fixes
  • Fix several issues found with clang's -fsanitize feature. Thanks to @jbnoblot for reporting them. See #114 for details.

v1.14.0

• New features

  • Support passing arguments to reboot via the /run/reboot-param file. This is required to support the Raspberry Pi's tryboot feature to implement A/B partition failback. See the README.md for info.
  • In the hostname pattern, support a special printf format specifier for trimming the left side of the serial number string. %-0.4s lets you use the 4 rightmost characters of the serial number in the hostname.

• Bug fixes

  • Disable core dumps before killing programs on shutdowns and reboots. This saves I/O operations that might impact the saving of important data.
  • Sync before killing programs on shutdowns and reboots to reduce the amount of I/O needed during the graceful part of the shutdown.

v1.13.0

• New features
  • Save and restore random number seeds with SeedRNG. This saves seeds to /root/seedrng since that's a persisted, writable location on Nerves. If not using Nerves, this location can be changed at compile-time using LOCALSTATEDIR.

v1.12.3

• Bug fixes
  • Switch default TERM setting from vt100 to xterm-256color. VT100 emulation was causing $<50> output delay sequences to be inserted and these aren't necessary. xterm-256color was determined to be a safe default for the majority of console users.

v1.12.2

• Bug fixes
  • Extend max config file line from 127 characters to 255 to allow for longer environment settings. You can also specify -env on multiple lines. Thanks to @pojiro for raising this issue.

v1.12.1

• Bug fixes
  • Remove absolute path requirement on --alternate-exec for binaries in the Erlang runtime. This makes it much less brittle to use since the ERTS directory has a version number in it that may change on every Erlang update. If you're using --alternate-exec to run run_erl, remove the absolute path to it. erlinit will run the one associated with the OTP release.

v1.12.0

• Changes

  • Check OTP release for ERTS before checking the system. The previous behavior was to only check one or the other based on whether --release-include-erts was specified.

• Bug fixes

  • Fixed missing handling of EINTR when running the program to get the device's ID. The handling has been missing since it was added and is not known to have caused issues. However, it could cause the device's ID to not be set.

v1.11.0

• New features
  • Export RELEASE_SYS_CONFIG, RELEASE_ROOT, and RELEASE_TMP to support Elixir mix releases that contain a runtime.exs. Support for runtime.exs is currently experimental.

v1.10.0

• New features

  • Added --limit option to enable core dumps, increase the number of processes, file descriptors and other settings that the ulimit command is normally used for.

    Use it like this:

    --limit core:456:unlimited
    

    The format is resource:soft_limit:hard_limit. The resources should be specified as lower case and can be found on the setrlimit(2) man page. The soft_limit and hard_limit can be either numbers or the word infinity.

• Bug fixes

  • Double the max length of release version names to 32 characters. This should hopefully be more than sufficient now.

v1.9.0

• New features
  • Support experimentation with using Linux's overlayfs to make normally read-only root filesystems be writable. See the --x-pivot-root-on-overlayfs option.
  • Restrict operations on the /dev mount. This prevents things like copying large files to /dev or using it as a place to run random binaries.

v1.8.0

• New features

  • Added --shutdown-report <path>. Whenever the Erlang VM exits, if a path has been specified, erlinit will write a short report that may be useful in debugging whatever caused the exit. In Nerves:

    config :nerves,
      erlinit: [shutdown_report: "/data/shutdown.txt"]

v1.7.1

• Bug fixes
  • $HOME is now set based on /etc/passwd rather than hardcoded to /root. This fixes an inconsistency in how erlinit worked and pretty much every Linux distribution. If the lookup fails, erlinit defaults to /root. Nerves creates a /etc/passwd that already has root's home directory set to /root, so most users won't notice a change.

v1.7.0

• New features

  • Added --tty-options parameter for initializing UARTs. E.g., --tty-options 115200n8 or in Nerves, use:

    config :nerves,
      erlinit: [ctty: "ttyS0", tty_options: "115200n8", alternate_exec: "/usr/bin/nbtty"]

    Only common baud rates and 8-bit/no parity are supported.

v1.6.1

• Bug fixes
  • Fix rootdisk symlink determination. Erlinit has been responsible for creating /dev/rootdisk* symlinks so that applications can generically figure out which block device is the boot disk. This is used for firmware updates, mounting other filesystems, etc. Previously a heuristic was used that worked a good amount of time. It broke or created extraneous symlinks on some systems. The new mechanism queries Linux directly and does a better job.

v1.6.0

• New features
  • Added the --release-include-erts option so that erlinit can use the ERTS provided by embedded release. Thanks to João Henrique Ferreira de Freitas for this feature.

v1.5.3

• Bug fixes
  • Change PROGNAME setting to erlexec so that OTP's slave works. slave had been calling erl which would try to figure out the ROOTDIR again. erlinit already sets ROOTDIR properly, so this isn't necessary and erl would also get it wrong.

v1.5.2

• Bug fixes
  • Due to an embedded timestamp for checking the system clock, erlinit was not reproducible. This adds support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. See https://reproducible-builds.org/ for motivation and more details.
  • Fix graceful shutdown time calculation bug. The seconds part of the calculation was correct, but the nanoseconds part was not. Since the default timeout was an even number of seconds, it's likely that this fix is doesn't affect many users.

v1.5.1

• Bug fixes
  • Fixed an issue with reaping zombie processes if too many died at once. If this happened and you ran ps, you'd start seeing processes in the Z state piling up over time.

v1.5.0

• New features
  • Support Elixir 1.9+ releases by setting the -boot_var RELEASE_LIB.

v1.4.9

• Bug fixes
  • Work around kernel message rate limiter. This makes it possible to see >10 messages when verbose is enabled.
  • Support merging commandline arguments together so that it's possible to launch erlang via run_erl. This is required since run_erl runs sh -c to start Erlang up and that requires all arguments to be passed as a long string. Example: -s "run_erl /tmp/ /tmp exec"

v1.4.8

• Bug fixes
  • Handle or fix hostnames that were generated with non-RFC 1123 compatible characters or failures with unique id generation.

v1.4.7

• Bug fixes
  • Fixed root disk detection when the root filesystem is on an NVME-connected SSD.

v1.4.6

• Bug fixes
  • Fixed permissions on /dev/shm so that non-root users could create shared memory. This is required for Chromium unless you want to run it as root.

v1.4.5

• Bug fixes
  • Refer to start_erl.data for determining which ERTS version to use. While this shouldn't be necessary, it is possible to get into situations with two versions of ERTS installed and this change prevents erlinit from getting confused and failing to boot.

v1.4.4

• Bug fixes
  • Restore a default signal mask on launched processes. Prior to this change, the application launched by erlinit would get erlinit's signal mask. This resulted in some unexpected behavior due to assumptions about signals being unmasked.

v1.4.3

• Bug fixes

  • Set the IPv6 loopback address (::1/128) on the loopback interface. Previously only the IPv4 loopback address was set. Both are set best effort.

• Regression test improvements

  • Regression tests work on both Linux and OSX now
  • Improved coverage of tests to verify calls to things like mount, ioctl, and reboot
  • fakechroot no longer needed
  • Removed "unit test" special build of erlinit. A test fixture shared library now similates the PID 1 environment that erlinit expects.

v1.4.2

• Bug fixes
  • Add dummy name to filesystem mounts. This fixes parse errors from programs that read /proc/self/mountinfo (in particular Docker). Thanks to Troels Brødsgaard for reporting this issue.

v1.4.1

• Bug fixes
  • Bulletproof hostname generation to avoid accidents that add whitespace in the hostname string.

v1.4.0

• New features
  • Add option to force system clock forward to the build date/time. This is off by default. This feature makes it possible to use code that depends on the clock not being in the 70s before NTP syncs.
  • Tighten file system mount options. While not bulletproof, this makes /sys and /proc nosuid, noexec, and nodev.
  • If mountpoints don't exist, try to create them. This is needed for cgroup support since the convention mounts the cgroup directories on a tmpfs.
  • Add the "rw" mount option. Even though this is the default, people sometimes specify it and this prevents the mount error from it not being recognized by erlinit.

v1.3.1

• Bug fixes
  • Addressed feedback to make rootdisk* symlinks more consistent with Linux naming. Not backwards compatible with the 1.3.0 naming.

v1.3.0

• New features
  • Create /dev/rootdisk* symlinks to the block devices that are on the same physical device. This makes it a lot easier to deal with systems that don't have predictable device names or don't have them early enough in the boot process.

v1.2.0

• New features
  • Support Elixir's consolidated directory if found.

v1.1.4

• Bug fixes
  • Fix reboot hang on the BBB when using the g_serial driver and sending the IEx prompt out the virtual serial port.

v1.1.3

• Bug fixes
  • Improve debug on graceful shutdown to help debug errors in the future. Also, handle some error returns that were not being handled before.
  • Change default to --reboot-on-fatal so that fatal errors from erlinit don't result in hung boards. This is the expectation in production, so users debugging erlinit issues should add --hang-on-fatal to their erlinit.config files from now on.

v1.1.2

• Bug fixes
  • Log to /dev/kmsg to avoid blocking on stderr due to error messages being printed. This fixes an issue blocking reboots when logging to a gadget serial port.

v1.1.1

• Bug fixes
  • Reap orphaned zombie processes

v1.1.0

• New features
  • Add graceful-shutdown-timeout option to specify longer or shorter timeouts for waiting for the Erlang VM to exit gracefully.

v1.0.1

• Fixes
  • Fix Erlang VM exit detection breakage introduced by graceful shutdown.

v1.0.0

• New features
  • Added support for graceful shutdowns. Now requests to reboot, halt, and power off won't immediately terminate the Erlang VM. It will get about 10 seconds to shut down graceful before it's killed.
  • Added support for reading start_erl.data to decide which version of a release to run.
  • Sorted all directory scans so that they're deterministic. Previously the order that files were read in a directory could determine what was run. While the order appeared stable in practice, it wasn't guaranteed.
  • Added --working-directory to change the current directory to something else. This was useful for OTP applications that wrote to the current directory.
  • Added quite a few more regression tests.

v0.8.0

• New features
  • Add -b/--boot parameter to specify which .boot file to run.
  • Add support for running a program before launching the Erlang VM. This simplifies a use case where wrapping the call to run the VM was too much work.

v0.7.3

• New features

  • Run a program when the Erlang VM exits. For example, run sh so that you can look around to gather debug information, or run another program to revert to a known good image.
  • Run the Erlang VM with non-superuser privileges (--uid and --gid options. Thanks to @ches for discussion on this topic.

• Fixes

  • Pass -boot_var ERTS_LIB_DIR ... to erlexec for platforms using the system libraries (Not Nerves). This is required for at least the use of erlinit in Yocto. Thanks to chrta for the fix.

v0.7.2

• New features
  • Print out the hostname on non-controlling terminals in case the user can connect over the network
  • Support passing --mount multiple times for more than one mount

v0.7.1

• New features

  • Support powering off on errors and fatals for platforms without and easy way to get out of a hang.

• Fixes

  • The 'halt' command works now.

v0.7.0

• New features
  • Added --warn-unused-tty to display warning when multiple tty's are available, but only one is used.
  • Added long options to make config files easier to read
  • Added -H, --reboot-on-exit to override a -h that was specified in the erlinit.config file from the kernel cmdline

v0.6.1

• Fixes
  • Builds using the musl C library now

v0.6.0

• New features
  • Support setting unique hostnames per board

v0.5.3

• New features

  • Works with exrm now

• Fixes

  • Only hang on exit if unintentional
  • Mount /run; clean up other mounts
  • Use first boot file if multiple are found
  • HOME environment variable is /root now so that it is possible to mount a writable filesystem there and use it

v0.4.6

• Fixes
  • Address issues found with Coverity