[yocto] Need for offline binary configuration

[Stewart, David C]

There are a ton of interesting interactions here with other efforts -
please review and comment.


On 11/20/12 7:09 AM, "Venkata ramana gollamudi"
<ramana.gollamudi at huawei.com> wrote:

>Poky allows to build custom Linux for you, but we have cases where the
>post build customization is required, like user-addition, network
>configuration, service control. Even selecting the required packages can
>be a post build activity.
>
>The current model requires the image to be rebuilt to support these
>configuration.
>Offline Configuration tool (OCT), which allows a binary image
>customization before making a final target image. This case will be more
>evident in larger companies, where platform teams, product teams ,
>application teams are distributed and Linux build from source will be
>owned and lab tested by a single team, like platform team. Other teams
>just configure to use it for product variants from same platform build.
>
>Detailed use cases can be found in enhancement bug:3252

I can certainly see how something like this would be a valuable addition
to the workflow, particularly at large organizations.

Of course, you could conceive of all of these things being configured in a
layer as well, but would require another bitbake run. I think you are
suggesting something separate from bitbake, and a lot more graphical /
interactive. 

>
>OCT should work on the binary pool of compiled packages generated from
>poky.
>
>The basic operations that can be supported includes
>a) Select/deselect required packages from pool of binary packages into
>final target image.
>b) Provision to select external binary packages like ADT compiled
>applications as input and add them to final target image.
>c) Binary level Offline configuration can includes
>      Configure the users/passwords
>      Configure the network
>      Configure the host name
>      Select the services to be started by default
>      Security related configuration
>      Generate initrd in ramfs/ext3/... format
>      etc..
>
>Considering the methods to support these in our current yocto model,
>following changes can be done.
>1) HOB can be the tool which can be extended to support these
>    Poky can generate a binary package pool as one if its output and Hob
>can work on this package pool to select packages, configure and generate
>image.
>So HOB can support opening HOB in Binary(or OCT) mode i.e., without build
>options but only with binary package selection. Configuration GUI needs
>to be added to HOB.
>Note:HOB+OCT is together or separate, needs a bit more thought and
>overall organization as they will be intended for different users.
>2) Binary package pool can be a minimal/partial sstate-cache, as complete
>sstate-cache is quite big and not required for product teams as they are
>not expected to build but just need to select and configure.
>    I think it is sufficient to keep the minimal binaries from
>sstate-cache which are required to execute image.bbclass, do_rootfs task
>to generate image.
>3) Along with specific configuration UI implementation, a generic
>configuration model similar to kernel kconfig and menuconfig can be
>considered, in cases where more detailed offline configurations is
>required like detailed security configuration.
>
>Regards,
>Ramana 
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