[yocto] Problems building live image

[K Richard Pixley]

On 3/13/16 22:16 , Gary Thomas wrote:
> I'd like to to some testing that qemu just doesn't seem up to
> so I attempted to build a live ISO per the documentation. I
> added these lines to local.conf:
>   IMAGE_FSTYPES_genericx86 += "live"
>   NOISO_genericx86 = "0"
>
> When I try to build core-image-base I get this error:
>   ERROR: INITRD_IMAGE_LIVE core-image-minimal-initramfs cannot use 
> image live, hddimg or iso.
>   ERROR: Check IMAGE_FSTYPES and INITRAMFS_FSTYPES settings.
>   ERROR: Failed to parse recipe: 
> /local/poky-cutting-edge/meta/recipes-core/images/core-image-minimal-initramfs.bb
>
> I'm using a recent Poky checkout 
> (d53413d3a8444c38a83ea37867c8af7754d8e702)
>
> Am I just doing something wrong here? I was following this section of 
> the mega-manual:
>
>   26.56. image-live.bbclass¶
>
>   The image-live class supports building "live" images.
>
>   Normally, you do not use this class directly. Instead, you add 
> "live" to IMAGE_FSTYPES.
>   For example, if you were building an ISO image, you would add "live" 
> to IMAGE_FSTYPES,
>   set the NOISO variable to "0" and the build system would use the 
> image-live class to
>   build the ISO image.
>
> I don't have any available hardware for this testing, so I thought
> I'd use VirtualBox.  Is this a reasonable approach?  I want to use
> a live ISO so I get a writable file system.  I tried just using the
> .hddimage but that doesn't boot with VirtualBox :-(
>
> To be clear, along with the additions above in local.conf, I tried:
>   $ MACHINE=genericx86 bitbake core-image-base
>
> Thanks for any ideas
You can boot the .hddimg on VirtualBox by first converting it to vdi, 
(or vmdk), using:

qemu-img convert -O vdi foo.hddimg foo.vdi

The vmdk doesn't seem to work for me on VMware, oddly.  And adding vmdk 
to IMAGE_FSTYPES doesn't seem to work either as it is apparently built 
from hdddirect, (no clue why that's distinct from hddimg but it doesn't 
boot for me).

--rich