[Freedombox-discuss] Dev: Allowing FM Images to Build themselves?

Nick M. Daly nick.m.daly at gmail.com
Fri May 31 02:08:14 UTC 2013


Hi folks, two things:

1. I'll be in Seattle and available to do stuff the night of 6/7 and
   during the day on 6/8.  If you're around the area, we should meet
   up.  Fortune permitting, I'll be at the GSLUG meeting on 6/8 and
   happy to talk about FBX stuff.

2. How do we make VM images self-buildable?

If you've taken a look at recent VirtualBox images, you'll know that
they don't include FM itself.  That's an oversight (IIRC), but it brings
up a good point: since VirtualBox OSE doesn't support passing through
USB devices to the VM, we can't use a running VirtualBox image to build
a bootable USB stick or microSD card.  We can certainly use VBox to
build a new VBox image, but that's no fun.

Any thoughts or patches on how to allow VBox images build physical cards?

I see a few options:

1. Switch to VBox CSE: I'm against that, as I'd rather not have to rely
   on each image passing through a proprietary USB driver on its way to
   disk.  See also, that whole software freedom philosophy thing.

2. Build a USB driver for VBox OSE: That's a lot of work.

3. Switch to QEmu or something similar: Probably the easiest in the
   long run, but requires patching FM's ``bin/mk_virtualbox_image``.
   I'll look into this in the near future (this weekend?)

Any other ideas?

Thanks for your time,
Nick
-- 
If you need to get in touch with me, try any of these methods:
https://www.betweennowhere.net/nick-daly.asc.txt

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