Just wanted to add a couple of comments:
Zygmunt commented earlier that creating master images is hard. I actually disagree, but that is all about perspective and familiarity. I create master images on a *very* regular basis and it's pretty easy once you know what you're doing, but that's the point. It's about what you're most familiar with.
+1 on Spring's idea that we should get l-m-c to create a tailored, partitioned image. I've thought the same for a while, but since it's application was only for LAVA I felt it would be a far lower priority than many other things.
Also +1 on the longer term strategy of supporting NBD (or whatever) type solutions.
Like others in this thread, I'm also concerned about the attempt to reproduce conmux within LAVA. Yes, we get rid of a lot of nasty Perl code (in case I offend, which I don't intend to, I mean Perl is nasty, not the implementation,) but we have to consider whether the effort involved would significantly benefit us in the end result.
Additionally, the idea of not supporting the serial interface, which has the distinct advantage of capturing the log all in one place, I find difficult to justify. Whilst I'm not completely wedded to it, as Ricardo said, it is the one interface that is guaranteed to be provided across all boards in one form or another. If we'd not had it, we would be significantly further behind in deploying origens right now.
++2c
Dave Pigott Validation Engineer T: +44 1223 45 00 24 | M +44 7940 45 93 44 Linaro.org │ Open source software for ARM SoCs Follow Linaro: Facebook | Twitter | Blog
On 8 Dec 2011, at 09:39, Spring Zhang wrote:
Generally, there are two ways to drive the boards: by serial line or network(NFS maybe plus NBD). If all switching to NFS, I'm sure there will be other problems in daily using.
For the MAC address issue, it will occur both on current master/tester image layout and NFS deployment if uboot can't get board fused MAC address and pass it to kernel.
For the master image generation, I think the best way is to make LMC be able to create a custom master SD card layout, now it only needs to extend to shrink boot and rootfs partition, and make two or more blank partitions(testboot and testrootfs) with label in one command.
-- Best wishes, Spring Zhang