On 1/22/26 3:28 AM, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
Hi
On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 2:57 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 10:54:42AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
On Thu, 22 Jan 2026 at 10:40, Daniel P. Berrangé <[email protected]> wrote:
Once we have written some scripts that can build gcc, binutils, linux,
busybox we've opened the door to be able to support every machine type
on every target, provided there has been a gcc/binutils/linux port at
some time (which covers practically everything). Adding new machines
becomes cheap then - just a matter of identifying the Linux Kconfig
settings, and everything else stays the same. Adding new targets means
adding a new binutils build target, which should again we relatively
cheap, and also infrequent. This has potential to be massively more
sustainable than a reliance on distros, and should put us on a pathway
that would let us cover almost everything we ship.
Isn't that essentially reimplementing half of buildroot, or the
system image builder that Rob Landley uses to produce toybox
test images ?
If we can use existing tools to achieve this, that's fine.
Imho, both approaches are complementary. Building images from scratch,
like toybox, to cover esoteric minimal systems. And more complete and
common OSes with mkosi which allows you to have things like python,
mesa, networking, systemd, tpm tools, etc for testing.. We don't want
to build that from scratch, do we?
I ran into this need recently, and simply used podman (or docker) for
this purpose.
$ podman build -t rootfs - < Dockerfile
$ container=$(podman create rootfs)
$ podman export -o /dev/stdout $container |
/sbin/mke2fs -t ext4 -d - out.ext4 10g
$ podman rm -f $container
It allows to create image for any distro (used it for alpine and
debian), as long as they publish a docker container. As well, it gives
flexibility to have a custom init, skipping a lengthy emulated boot with
a full system. As a bonus, it's quick to build, and does not require
recompiling the world to get something.
You can debug things too by running the container on your host machine,
which is convenient.
I took a look at bootc, but was not really convinced of what it added
for my use case compared to the 4 commands above.
Just my 2 cents,
Pierrick
