2.5. cpio

The cpio utility uses a default block size of 512 bytes for I/O operations. This may not be supported by certain types of tape devices. If a tape device does not support this block size, cpio fails with the following error message:

cpio: read error: Cannot allocate memory

To work around this issue, modify the default block size with the --block-size long option, or use the -B option to set the block size to 5120 bytes. When the block size supported by the tape device is provided, the cpio utility works as expected. (BZ#573943 )