[fedora-arm] Possible File Formats for a Fedora ARM release

[Chris Tyler]

On Fri, 2012-02-03 at 16:25 -0800, Brendan Conoboy wrote:
> The support grid is really just 2x2: You're either armv5tel or armv7hl. 
>   You either need a separate partition for bootloader bits (omap, etc 
> scenario) or you don't (tegra scenario).  Putting together tarball that 
> has everything a person needs for most systems is doable.  A couple 
> paragraphs per board type for how to get the specific board type is all 
> it will take in the way of specialized documentation.  In most cases it 
> will simply be a matter of a couple setenv commands.

Can we really reduce this to 2x2?...

Partitioning:
- one partition (tegra)(kirkwood)
- two partitions (omap)(happy kirkwood)(raspi)
- three partitions or more (jcm ;-)
- non-partitioned bootloader area plus two partitions (ecafe)

Kernel format:
- uImage
- uImage plus prepended headers (raspi)

Bootloader configuration:
- boot.scr
- nand
- cmdline.txt

Bootloader binary:
- MLO in partition 1 (omap)
- gpu firmware in partition 1 (raspi)
- in nand (plug computers)

...etc.

But back to the original question: what's the optimal way to package an
installable image? I see several valid options:

(1)- Per-platform image with MBR plus one or more partitions, with the
last partition shipped as minimal length and resizable to fill the
device (either at installation or firstboot).

(2)- Per-platform tarball, including a tarball for a boot partition (if
applicable) plus a tarball of the rootfs, plus some sort of layout
config file (XML? script?) that configures how the partitioning is set
up.

(3)- Generic per-arch (armv5tel/armv7hl) rootfs tarball plus
per-platform boot tarball, separately downloaded. (Nice to cache the
rootfs if installing into multiple, different devices, but messy as far
as RPM knowledge of what's on the boot partition).

I think having an easy installer is ultimately more important than which
format we use. To get tens of thousands of people running Fedora on
Raspis in the next six months, for example, we need a tool that's
friendly, dirt-simple to use, and ideally runs on Windows as well as
Fedora.

--
Chris