The process that you are describing is commonly called "device provisioning." I have experienced this process from different angles: working for a company making functional test equipment for electronics production lines and working for a company providing software for set-top boxes.
>From this experience provisioning is frequently done during production at the end of the process when the automated functional test is performed. During these tests the devices are fired up, get their device image installed, receive their individual programming and are tested. Dependent on the device there are many methods on how to do it. I have used serial ports, networked provisioning servers, direct programming of OTP or flash using the tester, etc. It may be a cool thing to have for YP but it may also somewhat out of the scope of YP. In one way or another you will always have to put your data onto the root file system. Unfortunately, creating a root file system is always somewhat expensive and time consuming. Many times when I am making changes to my YP build environment just rebuilding a single package creating the root file system is the most time consuming part of the process. My preferred way of provisioning is a networked provisioning server. In most cases, you will have to store the configuration data anyway, so I store it in a database on the provisioning server. I have not done this with YP but if had to do it I would look into using TCF. When the device boots it starts up TCF. The provisioning server connects to the TCF server on the device, pushes the files it needs, etc. It's a fun project but if you look at it from that angle it's not that much related to YP as a build system. It's like any other application package. You build it with YP and add it to the root file system. :rjs
_______________________________________________ yocto mailing list yocto@yoctoproject.org https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto