Adding a profile to imagebuilder?

For Developers
1

Hi,

I am trying to make a build for the Wink Hub v1, which is imx.28-based, like the duckbill et al. Rather than building everything from scratch, I thought I would try update the imagebuilder to build the images appropriately for the Wink 1, with a chosen device tree, etc. I created an 04-wink-hub-1.mk as a copy of 01-duckbill.mk in target/linux/mxs/profiles/, but cannot get e.g. make .profiles.mk to include it. Clearly I am missing where scripts/target-metadata.pl is pulling the data from, but my Perl is VERY rusty.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

2

I figured out that it needs to go into .targetinfo, so I added a stanza like:

Target-Profile: wink1
Target-Profile-Name: Wink Hub v1
Target-Profile-Packages:   -dnsmasq -firewall -ppp -ip6tables -iptables -6relayd uboot-envtools kmod-leds-gpio -kmon-ipt-nathelper
Target-Profile-Description:
        Wink Hub v1

modeled on the duckbill.

I also modified target/linux/mxs/image/Makefile, adding imx28-wink1 to BOARDS, and I get all the way to creating the uImage, where it dies trying to find imx28-wink1.dts. The Wink 1 is apparently based on the imx28-evk, so I plan to copy the imx28-evk.dts and modify to suit. Since the .dts has already been compiled to .dtb in the ImageBuilder download, I'm happy for that to be a manual step before invoking make.

I then added a stanza for wink1 to target/linux/mxs/image/Makefile:

define Image/Build/Profile/wink1
        $(call Image/Build/SDCard-ext4-ext4,$(1),$(2),imx28-wink1,wink1)
endef

And this is where I think I am stuck. Due to the REALLY old u-boot installed on the Wink Hub 1, I need to create a uImage that has the dtb appended to the kernel zImage. I'd also like to create a ubifs filesystem instead of an SDCard image, since that is what is already in place. I guess I could always reformat, and tar cPf / | tar -C /mnt xvPf - to copy everything from one filesystem to another, but it would simplify things, I think, if I could just create it appropriately.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

3

This appears to work to create a combined kernel zImage + dtb uImage:

 mkimage -T kernel -A arm -O linux -a 0x40008000 -e 0x40008000 -C none -d ./build_dir/target-arm_arm926ej-s_musl_eabi/linux-mxs/zImage -d ./build_dir/target-arm_arm926ej-s_musl_eabi/linux-mxs/linux-5.10.176/arch/arm/boot/dts/imx28-wink1.dtb ./build_dir/target-arm_arm926ej-s_musl_eabi/linux-mxs/uImage_with_dtb

And the root filesystem appears to be in ./build_dir/target-arm_arm926ej-s_musl_eabi/root-mxs/, as long as I exclude ./boot, which would unnecessarily blow up the size with zImage and uImage files. Fortunately, since u-boot actually supports ubifs, I could combine the app-kernel and gpmi-nfc-general-use (rootfs) nand partitions. Of course, since the app-kernel partition is 8MB, there is no real need to do that either, as there is plenty of space for a modern kernel there too.

4

I concluded that I need to build a custom version of the kernel anyway to support the SDIO wifi adapter, so going too far down the imagebuilder route was counterproductive.

5

You can try my software, it's still in development but should work. It allows some basic functionality for building from source, adding kernel arguments, etc beyond the imagebuilder.

6

Interesting. How would I define my own profiles?

7

You can look in the profiles file for some existing profiles as a guide, it's "bashy" so you store the profile in an associative array with the same name as the profile. Commit-ish should work in --source mode if you want to pick specific builds. Source mode implements git worktree to create multiple build targets from a single cloned repo. Next step is to add patching and better documentation.

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8

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