On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 12:20 PM, Fathi Boudra <fathi.boudra@linaro.org> wrote:

Hi,

On 20 May 2013 13:00, Nicolas Dechesne <nicolas.dechesne@linaro.org> wrote:
> hi there,
>
> i am aware and familiar with hwpacks that were initially designed and used
> to generate ubuntu/android Linaro images.
>
> however i don't know if hwpacks are being used for OE images nowadays?

Yes, they are. To create an OE pre-built image, we use l-m-c in
combination of an OE rootfs+hwpack.

ok.

> OE has intrinsic mechanism to generate/construct full images which include
> machine dependent binaries as well as generic components. So are we still
> using hwpacks for building OE images somehow or not? Can someone point me to
> relevant documentation?

You can look at the following CI jobs:
https://ci.linaro.org/jenkins/job/openembedded-armv7a-pre-built-images-panda
https://ci.linaro.org/jenkins/job/openembedded-armv8-pre-built-images-vexpress64

the following folder seems to be empty:

http://snapshots.linaro.org/openembedded/images/lamp-armv7-gcc-4.7

so, from that job, i can see that Panda OE prebuilt images are made by re-using the 'ubuntu' hwpacks which I believe is generated from this job:

https://ci.linaro.org/jenkins/view/engineering-builds/job/ubuntu-armhf-hwpacks/

And that 'versatile' OE images are built using OE hwpacks (it's about the -pw argument).

So couple of more questions:

- why are there raring hwpacks for PAnda and OE hwpacks for versatile? is that what hwpack v4 is about? do we intend to get a single hwpack for all distro that we care about?

- i don't find the job that creates the versatile hwpacks in Jenkins, can you give me the link? i'd like to understand how it's built.

Well, i find all these things a little bit convoluted, i hope this is because i am new to it ;-) and having the scripts spread across multiple repo (git, lp, and part of the scripts in Jenkins job definition) doesn't really help.

For historical reason, linaro-image-tools is making a few assumptions
(ubuntu and deb packages).
Since our engineering builds have evolved (android, fedora,
openembedded, ubuntu),
we're slowly fixing those assumptions and going to a distro agnostic approach.

does that mean moving all scripts/tools away from LP? I can see a few things from LP bazaar, i think having all our tools on git.linaro.org would be nice. no rant here.. just consistency ;-)

There's a session planned to talk about this topic: hwpackv4.

i will attend for sure. is there any wiki/doc already available on what might change?

i remember the very first discussions about hwpacks couple of years ago, and i think i understand the main motivations for them, however with OE i tend to believe that hwpacks are much less needed and more a source of pain than something useful. The thing is that most of the problems that hwpacks want to solve are solved already in OE, unlike with Ubuntu and Android which were the 2 distro used when hwpacks were designed.

so from the perspective of a Linaro user, or a customer who will care only about OE, and there will be such cases, we need to make sure that we don't create a tool that is going to be counter-productive vs a 'vanilla' OE solution.

> in the short future i will have to build OE images for a couple of different
> h/w boards, so i am trying to understand the process to do that a-la Linaro.
>
> thanks
>
> nicolas

Cheers,
Fathi