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

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Mark Langsdorf
<mark.langsdorf at calxeda.com> wrote:
> On 02/06/2012 10:33 PM, Chris Tyler wrote:
>
>>
>> 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.
>
> Speaking for a possible minority position here, I'd also like to
> see a solution that scales well for business customers looking
> to provision dozens to hundreds of notes with real SATA drives.
> A generic 2GB image intended for an SD-card is probably not going
> to fit the bill.

No, you would want a standard anaconda install for that using
kickstart files. The is planned and TBH may already even work.

> I don't see how anything other than option 3 is sustainable over
> any significant number of different platforms, though. So I'd
> want to see a resizable generic per-arch rootfs that is
> intended to be the last partition following 0 or more boot
> partitions that are platform specific.

I agree. The ultimate plan is to use anaconda for all options. Things
will settle down when things like device-tree become the norm and we
can use a few standard kernels across devices.

Peter