[fedora-arm] F21 disk image idea

[Gordan Bobic]

Still no chance of an actual installer any time soon, then?

On 01/08/2014 10:16 PM, Brendan Conoboy wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> There are two significant issues with the disk images in F20 that I
> would like to address in F21:
>
> 1. Duplicate disk images with and without a VFAT partition.  This
> doubles QA load and can confuse end users.
>
> 2. Unlike x86 spins, images aren't always ready to be used after they're
> written to storage.  Instead, uboot bits need to be copied into place
> using a specific method.  This is unintuitive and prone to user error.
>
> In F18 and earlier we simply produced images per supported device, but
> the matrix of supported devices and spins makes this prohibitively
> expensive, so something else needs to be done.  The following proposal
> is one way to handle it, but I'm open to anything that improves on
> either or both of the aforementioned issues.
>
> The idea: 2 images per device, a board image and an OS image.  Here's
> how it works:
>
> The board image: This is a very small image that contains the essential
> bootloader bits for booting Fedora on a board.  It contains the
> bootloader if a board doesn't have one, a partition table, and just
> enough brains to load the proper dynamic material like extlinux.conf
> from the OS image.
>
> The OS image: This contains / (No separate /boot).  One per spin is all
> we need.
>
> The key idea is that we're trying to decouple the Fedora OS from the
> idiosyncrasies of the hardware.  We can make lots of board images,
> they're really small- they don't even need to be part of the Fedora
> release cycle unless we think that is desirable.
>
> For a hypothetical end user with a beaglebone black, the experience is
> something like:
>
> download f21-xfce.img
> download fedora-arm-bbb.img
> write f21-xfce.img to block device
> write fedora-arm-bbb.img to same block device
>
> Alternately:
>
> download f21-xfce.img
> download fedora-arm-bbb.img
> write fedora-arm-bbb.img to same block device
> partprobe
> write f21-xfce.img to partition 3 of block device
>
> Clearly some decisions need to be made about partition vs block device
> for the OS image, but ultimately we resolve issue #1 and simplify issue
> #2.  Assuming we went with writing a partition instead of a complete
> block device, end users would only need to install the per-device disk
> image once an could move between Fedora versions by updating the /
> partition.
>
> Anyway, that's where my mind is on this one.  What do you all think? Can
> you make it better?
>