Hi Stefano,

Am Montag, den 19.10.2020, 18:23 +0200 schrieb Stefano Babic:

Hi Enrico,

On 19.10.20 17:43, Enrico J?rns wrote:

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

I had the same use case as you, and I could use something like

part /app --source rawcopy --sourceparams="file=..."

and the file points to the image I want to put on the partition.

my intention was a bit different I think. I actually wanted to generate
the /app out of the rootfs image. But then re-use the resulting image.

To be honest I am less interested in the resulting disk image but in
the intermediate artifacts.

I've heard some older discussions on how to generate a separate /home
partition and a separate /data partition and it always turned out that
generating the single monolithic rootfs first and splitting it on a
per-folder base later is a straight-forward approach for most
scenarios.

Trying to get yocto to build images that do not contain things like
base-files, etc. was always painful and never meant to be supported
afaik.

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?

I have not a straightforward solution. I inherited just "image" and I
cleaned up at the end with a ROOTFS_POSTPROCESS_COMMAND what was
superfluous. Maybe forcing packagegroup-core-boot can be an option.

Yes, this would be the 'hacky' solution to the problem. Actually, I
would prefer finding a solution that is supported out-of-the-box and
compatible with how OE sees the generation of images.

Thus re-using the wic fs artifacts appears to be one possible straight-
forward solution to me. The only thing is that I actually would not
even need the disk image itself probably.

A syntax could look like

part / --source rootfs output=my-rootfs-without-appfs.ext4 --fstype=ext4
part /app --source rootfs output=my-appfs.tar.bz --fstype=tar.bz2
part /home --source rootfs output=my-homefs.ext4 --fstype=ext4

Another option could be to introduce some kind of syntax in the file
system generation classes. But I have neither a clue on how to do that
without violating the current behavior of creating only one image per
image type nor a good idea yet on how to name the artifacts.

Best regards,
Stefano

Thanks Stefano and best regards

Enrico

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