initramfs: Check timestamp to prevent broken cpio archive

Cpio format reserves 8 bytes for an ASCII representation of a time_t timestamp.
While 2106-02-07 06:28:15 UTC (time_t = 0xffffffff) is still some years in the
future, a poorly chosen date string for KBUILD_BUILD_TIMESTAMP, converted into
seconds since the epoch, might lead to exceeded cpio timestamp limits that
result in a broken cpio archive.  Add timestamp checks to prevent overrun of
the 8-byte cpio header field.

My colleague Thomas Kühnel discovered the behaviour, when we accidentally fed
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to KBUILD_BUILD_TIMESTAMP as is: some timestamps (e.g.
1607420928 = 2021-12-08 9:48:48 UTC) will be interpreted by `date` as a valid
date specification of science fictional times (here: year 160742).  Even though
this is bad input for KBUILD_BUILD_TIMESTAMP, it should not break the initramfs
cpio format.

Signed-off-by: Nicolas Schier <nicolas@fjasle.eu>
Cc: Thomas Kühnel <thomas.kuehnel@avm.de>
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
1 file changed