There are a ton of interesting interactions here with other efforts -
please review and comment.


On 11/20/12 7:09 AM, "Venkata ramana gollamudi"
<ramana.gollamudi@...> wrote:

Poky allows to build custom Linux for you, but we have cases where the
post build customization is required, like user-addition, network
configuration, service control. Even selecting the required packages can
be a post build activity.

The current model requires the image to be rebuilt to support these
configuration.
Offline Configuration tool (OCT), which allows a binary image
customization before making a final target image. This case will be more
evident in larger companies, where platform teams, product teams ,
application teams are distributed and Linux build from source will be
owned and lab tested by a single team, like platform team. Other teams
just configure to use it for product variants from same platform build.

Detailed use cases can be found in enhancement bug:3252

I can certainly see how something like this would be a valuable addition
to the workflow, particularly at large organizations.

Of course, you could conceive of all of these things being configured in a
layer as well, but would require another bitbake run. I think you are
suggesting something separate from bitbake, and a lot more graphical /
interactive.

OCT should work on the binary pool of compiled packages generated from
poky.

The basic operations that can be supported includes
a) Select/deselect required packages from pool of binary packages into
final target image.
b) Provision to select external binary packages like ADT compiled
applications as input and add them to final target image.
c) Binary level Offline configuration can includes
Configure the users/passwords
Configure the network
Configure the host name
Select the services to be started by default
Security related configuration
Generate initrd in ramfs/ext3/... format
etc..

Considering the methods to support these in our current yocto model,
following changes can be done.
1) HOB can be the tool which can be extended to support these
Poky can generate a binary package pool as one if its output and Hob
can work on this package pool to select packages, configure and generate
image.
So HOB can support opening HOB in Binary(or OCT) mode i.e., without build
options but only with binary package selection. Configuration GUI needs
to be added to HOB.
Note:HOB+OCT is together or separate, needs a bit more thought and
overall organization as they will be intended for different users.
2) Binary package pool can be a minimal/partial sstate-cache, as complete
sstate-cache is quite big and not required for product teams as they are
not expected to build but just need to select and configure.
I think it is sufficient to keep the minimal binaries from
sstate-cache which are required to execute image.bbclass, do_rootfs task
to generate image.
3) Along with specific configuration UI implementation, a generic
configuration model similar to kernel kconfig and menuconfig can be
considered, in cases where more detailed offline configurations is
required like detailed security configuration.

Regards,
Ramana
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