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?
I've often needed similar functionality.
Sometimes I wonder if one could make a recipe/class that depends on the rootfs contents, installs some packages, and packages the resulting differences - maybe using the --exclude option to tar?
