On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Jamie Bennett jamie.bennett@linaro.org wrote:
On 21 Jan 2011, at 15:42, Loïc Minier wrote:
On Fri, Jan 21, 2011, Jamie Bennett wrote:
Currently we are reassessing whether or not the Headless image meets the requirements for a small, fast, useable image for board verification. Just for information the current stats as of 2011-01-21 are:
- Download Size: 64M
- Download size with OMAP3 hwpack: 100M
- Package count: 260
The list of package currently on the image can be found at:
https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Foundations/Specs/HeadlessImage#Package List
The current thoughts are to cut this image down as much as possible whilst still retaining the ability to boot to a command prompt. The new image would be a 'nano' image and would be useful for verifying that the hardware boots. For a more complete console-only image for developers a full-featured developer image would be created. See my other email entitled "Call for opinion: Linaro 'Developer' Image" for that.
Is anyone *really* against this idea and is satisfied with the Headless image in its current state? Opinions? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Could we do with an initrd instead of an image? I mean, busybox + small set of tools is probably enough for validation, and will be quite small.
There is inherent bloat as soon as we add a package manager in the mix
Right, current thoughts after some IRC discussion are:
* busybox * no package manager * max size of 30mb (without kernel) * some further removal of packages
I think with this in place you will get a ~30mb compress rootfs, we could even go further if necessary.
I imagine it becomes pretty important to define what use-cases it is intended to cover. What set of tools are important in a verification image? An awful lot of the time all I want is an initrd with busybox. The one I'm currently using weighs in at only 2.1M, and for my purposes I don't want anything larger. (But I'm also do silly fringe things like boot a system without touching any form of storage). :-)
OTOH, I'm beginning to use autotest a lot, and python on the target is a requirement for installing test cases, which kind of blows 2.1M out of the water.
g.