Re: DTBs in images, kexec & installer testing
On Sun, 2014-07-20 at 13:19 +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Jul 2014 12:54:06 +0100
> Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > One of my current blockers is the lack of modules - it would be nice
> > to be able to boot the daily netboot kernel & initrd but have access
> > to the kernel modules from the same build. This allows the daily
> > build kernel to be tested independently of DI and without needing to
> > build a whole rootfs or use qemu to upgrade the kernel inside the
> > image. Of course, standard upgrades using apt inside the image can be
> > done too but it's quicker and more flexible if the modules could be
> > downloaded from within the initrd.
> >
> > How easy might it be to have the modules.tgz alongside the vmlinuz at
> > http://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/ ?
FWIW linux-image-foo from the regular archive is ~equivalent to a
modules.tgz, except it happens to also contain the kernel itself + some
metadata.
> > I was wondering about downloading core-modules-3.14-1-armmp-di and
> > simply unpacking it....
>
> ... as there's no network support, that'll need to be a custom initrd
> with core-modules inside it.... ho hum....
You don't necessarily need to repack the initrd, since you can append a
second cpio to the existing one and the kernel will unpack both.
One pitfall is that the to-be-appended cpio needs to have all the path
elements, so you need to remember to include /lib, /lib/modules
and /lib/modules/$(uname -r) etc in the archive and not just the files
themselves (it took me an age to figure out why my appended initrd was
silently ignored).
The xen osstest system code to do something along these lines is at
http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=osstest.git;a=blob;f=mg-debian-installer-update;h=b964f95f8e9eee173cf56ca1dd830281114245b8;hb=HEAD#l104
the armmp.cpio.gz which results is concatenated with the regular
installer initrd.gz. We use this to install Wheezy but using a newer
(backports.org) kernel which is needed for the platform in our test env.
Ian.
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