Re: sd image creator: armstrap anyone?
+++ Leonardo Canducci [2013-05-31 18:10 +0200]:
> I'm playing with my new Cubieboard. I discovered armstrap[1] on IRC
> and it seems pretty cool. Anybody tried it? What do you think?
>
> [1] https://github.com/EddyBeaupre/armStrap
I'm sure it's useful for cubieboards, and it does seem sensibly put
together, but the idea that it is 'universal' is pretty optimisitic.
It covers the case where you want to cross-build a local kernel source
tree and combine that into a debootstrapped debian rootfs, for an
architecture that has qemu support, and where the image ends up on an
SD card.
Now that covers a fair number of boards and it seems to have been
written with generality in mind, but it's no use at all for most of
the boards I have to hand (nand, not SD, or targetting arm64 (no
qemu)). The more boards you try to make it work on, the more the
assumptions will become noticeable and the more options it will have
to grow.
There is something 'special' about every board IME. That's why
multistrap just provides 'config-script' and 'setup-script' functions
to do whatever jiggery-pokery is needed (and that mechanism can work
without qemu). There is a lot of commonality in the sorts of
jiggery-pokery needed for many devices of course.
There have been 101 scripts like this written. I think live-build
already does pretty-much all that this script does (except probably
building a local kernel source). Polystrap/multistrap also does this.
Enhancing those generic tools with cubie config and a kernel-build
option might have been smarter than making yet another framework.
There are already at least 16 tools I know of for making rootfs images
of one sort or another in debian.
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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