Re: Debian 7.0 on Dreamplug basic installation and booting system external sd card

[Stanley Pilton <stanley.pilton@gmail.com>]

Loïc,

Thanks for your input.  Some thoughts from a user POV below.

For our dreamplugs, we want to have an identical bootloader
configuration on each device, and have the behaviour of the system
from the OS up defined by the content of the removable SD card, not
the internal card.  In other words, we would like to be able to change
the SD cards over between two of the devices, and have the whole
system, including the kernel and initrd, come across.

Having the kernel on internal storage and the rest of the system on
external storage does not allow us to do this.

> Which devices would this be particularly useful on right now and what
> formats do we want to support first and foremost?  How do we detect the
> device U-Boot will look after?

We are quite happy with constraints such as "it must be an ext2
filesystem directly on a partition of the card", as long as this is
clearly documented.

I think a key point is that the installer and any other software
managing the boot files should know where to write based on where
/boot is.  In other words, I wouldn't expect the user to have to tell
the OS twice where the boot partition is - this is already configured
by the /boot mountpoint, isn't it?

Working out what /boot corresponds to in bootloader terms, and thus
configuring the bootloader correctly, then becomes the problem.  But I
think the problem should be stated this way round.  In simple cases it
should be easy.  If it can't be deduced, this error needs to propogate
up to the user.

  cheers, Stanley