On 13 February 2012 22:32, Zygmunt Krynicki zygmunt.krynicki@linaro.org wrote:
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:13 PM, Paul Larson paul.larson@linaro.org wrote: I
suspect nfs is not going to be a viable option at all for things like android. So what about revisiting why we cant use a real image before we make this more difficult than it really needs to be? I think the main thing was the image size, but since we've started looking at our main use cases for fast models, what stands out is that we really could cover our testing in nano and android - which should both fit fine in < 2GB.
We don't have any boot loaders that work from SD.
Yeah. The SD approach would simply be that instead of root=/dev/nfs and a rootfs expanded out into somewhere served over nfs, you have the rootfs in an image file and say root=/dev/mmblk0p2 [or whatever]. This should be fine as long as the image can be kept under 2GB (bearing in mind that if you have the KVM host (ie fast models guest) use an SD card image then that image must contain within itself the root fs image for the KVM guest as well, so really you're working with more like a 1GB limit for each of host and guest). You also need to be able to insert the qemu-linaro binary under test into the KVM host rootfs, but that shouldn't be much harder either way I guess; slightly more faff to loopback-mount an sd image and manipulate it but not much.
I have no idea how android on fast models will work, but presumably it's still just a kernel you start with some arguments? If it doesn't start using the same kernel boot process as Linux then the boot wrapper will need significant work before you can boot an Android system at all.
-- PMM