[pkg-fso-maint] d-i installation on embedded devices (was Re: MTD Installation)

Per Andersson avtobiff at gmail.com
Thu Mar 26 16:47:28 UTC 2009


Hi!

Yesterday while doing research about UBI and MTD I
found the nandsim module. This is a kernel module
which emulates a MTD flash device. Of course this
would be great to have when developing software that
uses MTD.

My first question is if it is possible to run d-i without
having to boot it. Use case would be to use the
nandsim module (maybe from inside a chroot) "live"
on my normal installation instead of having to boot
the installer in, say, QEMU.

Second question: If that is not possible, how do I
emulate MTD with QEMU. AFAIK it is not possible
with -M versatilepb, which Debian provides kernels
for. This would mean that I would need a custom
kernel, how does that work together with d-i?
(Maybe not a problem if I don't finish the install but
just quit after partition step?)

Third question: What do you think about the scope of
the MTD Partitioning and Installation project? Would it
fill 3 months? (I think it would.)

So far I propose creating partman modules:
* partman-ubi
* partman-auto-ubi
* partman-ubifs

Of course also documentation of how everything
works.

Suggestions on scope and/or additional tasks
(that I might have missed)?

As an exercise I give a draft of an implementation
proposal below. Please comment wildely.

For the modules scripts would be built for init.d,
display.d, check.d, commit.d, finish.d etc.

Example partman-ubi:
* init.d -> script that recognizes MTD device(s) and
  loads appropriate kernel modules.
* display.d -> partitioning the MTD, create data
  structures based on user input. (Exit code set
  properly, 100 for success, 255 for failure and 0 for
  no action performed.)
* check.d -> check that partitioning scheme is ok.
* commit.d -> clean MTD flash and use ubimkvol for
  creating UBI volume.
* finish.d -> write partition scheme to fstab etc.

As a ball park figure I expect that this would 3 weeks
to finish. Opinions?

Lastly, is there someone willing to mentor this?


Best regards,
Per



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