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?
--
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc@xxxxxxxxxx
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