[fedora-arm] Interesting project to generate system images; Fwd: Set of tools for embedded systems

[Gerard Braad]

Hello,


below you can find an email which I received related to creating
system images for a Fedora embedded-like system. It would be a good
idea to discuss this possibility as I am sure we can all benefit for a
standardize process (complete or partly).

kind regards,


Gerard

-- 
Gerard Braad — 吉拉德
   Open Source/Linux Consultant in Beijing
   Project-lead Fedora-MIPS
   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:gbraad


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Federico Simoncelli <federico.simoncelli at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 5:12 PM
Subject: Set of tools for embedded systems
To: gbraad at fedoraproject.org


Hi all,
my plan is to build a set of tools to generate and write a system
rootfs to a device (SD, CF, etc...).

The main features I'm focusing on are:
* It should work for any architecture (x86, arm, mips, etc...) to
gather in one project all the experience from each group of developers
* Once you have the rootfs, it must be fast (imagine you have to
produce the largest amount of SD/CF devices possible)

Right now I'm dealing with x86 processors so I'll explain what my
script does for me and I hope in some feedback about what you need to
make it work on your architecture:

Tasks:
1 Partition the device
2 Format the partitions
3 Mount the filesystems
4 Explode the rootfs tar.gz
5 Replace some files (and tuning), eg: fstab (tmpfs, noatime),
sysctl.conf (swappiness), inittab (agetty)
6 Relabel (if selinux is needed) - not yet fully working, any selinux
expert out there?
7 Unmount the partitions
8 Install the bootloader (only grub for now)

Things we should discuss about:
* Can we all decide to use qemu to install the system on a file device
and standardize the generation of the rootfs tar.gz too?
* In task 5 there are a lot of things that are common to everybody
(eg: swappiness, tmpfs) and many things that are hardware related (eg:
ifcfg-ethX), we should split them
* Relabeling is currently not working, I need help
* Do we need to support an other bootloader?
* Can we build a system-restore feature?

Thank you for you attention,
Best regards,
--
Federico Simoncelli
federico.simoncelli at gmail.com