Hi,

as I did not have much success with my question in the OR irc, let's
try it here in a more verbose way. ;)

Imagine I have an A+B redundant boot system, with additional bootloader
and separate home or application file system. Thus my layout would be
like:

p1: bootloader
p2: rootfs A
p3: rootfs B
p4: appfs A
p5: appfs B

where rootfs A + appfs A form a logical unit with respect to the image-
based update handling.

No my question is: How do I generate the images required for the
bootloader partition and/or the appfs partition with the OE standard
image generation mechanisms?

We have a working solution with the 'genimage' tool for quite some
time, but I wonder if that could be done with the more tightly
integrated wic, too.


To my understanding, the way of creating something like a bootloader
image or an application file system is by using wic's image split
capabilities and doing (non-redundant example):

part /boot --source rootfs (or some plugin)
part / ... --source rootfs
part /app --source rootfs

This will create multiple file system images out of the prior monolitic
rootfs one. It also does all necessary changes for mounting, like
modifying the rootfs /etc/fstab etc.
Thus, using these generated images in my update scenario would be the
way to go for me.


BUT, currently I do not see any straight-forward way of how to use
them. One could add them to what the image_wic* image fstypes generate,
but this will violate the default rule that each image fstype generates
exactly one image.
And the generated images are a little hard to reference as one cannot
give them names (which is probably a negligable issue) and they do not
have a fstype extension.
The more sever issue is that I would also like to have archives (like
tar.bz2) of the content of /app or /boot as I can use them quite good
for installing to partitions whose size and other parameters I do not
know very beforehand (also applicable to UBI volumes).

But, at the moment there does not seem to be a designated way of doing
something like I intended. I wonder how others solve the generation of
non-rootfs images with YP/OE?

Or did I miss something that already exists for this?



Thanks in advance and best regards

Enrico

--
Pengutronix e.K. | Enrico Jörns |
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