[yocto] [Openembedded-architecture] Standalone image writer

[Khem Raj]

> On Feb 28, 2016, at 4:17 PM, Paul Eggleton <paul.eggleton at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> 
> (changing subject line so people don't miss this slight tangent)
> 
> I'd almost completely forgotten, but the part of what we wrote for Hob to
> write images to a USB stick or SD card (bitbake/bin/image-writer) is actually
> a standalone application. There's not a lot to it - pick your image file and
> then the device you want to write it to; it has some logic in it to not let
> you accidentally write to devices that aren't USB sticks.
> 
> A few points:
> 
> - I'm not sure very many people know this tool exists, so it's likely it's not
> being widely used. Having said that it is a nice simple UI that does the job.
> 
> - It shares some code with Hob, but mostly not the bits with code quality
> issues, though it is still GTK+ 2 based.
> 
> - It doesn't support the advanced SD card writing functionality that has been
> implented within wic over the last few releases, which is pretty important for
> devices where a special partition layout is expected by the bootloader.
> 
> - Toaster can't really have this functionality in it because it's web based
> and the web server might not be running locally, so writing to a local USB
> stick or SD card isn't going to be practical from there; about all it could do
> is provide instructions on how to write the image once you've downloaded it.
> 
> - I believe there are other equivalent tools out there that various distros
> use for taking a downloadable ISO image and writing it to a USB stick. I
> haven't done a survey to find out if if any of them work in quite the same way;
> I know some of them actually unpack the image and then re-create a filesystem
> on the device, which isn't the right thing for our images.
> 
> - We do have a command-line equivalent in the form of scripts/contrib/ddimage
> in OE-Core. Of course it's command-line and thus less friendly but it does the
> job (and also has some safeguards against writing to the wrong device).
> 
> So what do we do with this? We have two choices really:
> 
> A) Drop bitbake/bin/imagewriter along with Hob; we could potentially
> resurrect it again later if desired
> 
> B) Preserve it along with the shared modules that it requires
> 
> Thoughts?


Option A. There are USB writer tool in your favorite distros and OSes, and I have
seen people use those tools more often.

> 
> Cheers,
> Paul
> 
> --
> 
> Paul Eggleton
> Intel Open Source Technology Centre
> _______________________________________________
> Openembedded-architecture mailing list
> Openembedded-architecture at lists.openembedded.org
> http://lists.openembedded.org/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-architecture

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