Hi,
The factory image for Raspberry PI4 comes with only 104MB, which is not enough at all. I don’t like exroot solution or expand the partition after firmware upgraded, because I have to do it every time I upgrade the firmware. I wonder if there is a way to install user packages to another partition. For example, I have 16GB SD card and there are plenty room left after firmware upgrade.
Is it possible?
What's wrong with extroot ?
You can use owut to create a custom image, where the rootfs is 1GB.
extroot is always a quite major complication in regards to upgrades, I personally avoid it at all costs.
Using the imagebuilder to (always!) set a different partition size (and including the packages you'd normally install at runtime) would be my way out of this -- if you really need all that much stuff (it's a router, not a general purpose server - but I do know that f2fs has an enormous fs overhead on a 104 MB fs, so…).
--
…and mere data goes into a dedicated partition.
I also have a pi4b. What works best for me is when first setting up the sd card I do the normal dd=if and once that's done I fire up kde partition manager to expand the 104mb partition to 1024. Then I create a new partition in the unused free space of the sd card for storing extra junk. Finally after I get the pi up and running I set the owut to keep the root partition at 1024mb after an upgrade.
Probably there is better/easier ways to automate this but I am not super technical and this works for me, which is what matters.
In /etc/opkg.conf you can add 3rd source for packages.
Nothing wrong with exroot, just tried to do this every time.
owut seems good idea, never use it, will give a try. Thanks
Yes, I use image builder in the past, it just takes too long to build.
I just wonder how the factory image was built, can the person responsible for PI4 image set default rootfs to 512M instead of 104?
I think owut is good idea
I have opkg.conf:
dest root /
dest ram /tmp
lists_dir ext /var/opkg-lists
option overlay_root /overlay
option check_signature
You mean I can add a line “dest” to some directory?
After install owut and update AttendedSysupgrade package to latest version, I am able to set rootfs_size to 470M in /etc/config/attendedsysupgrade:
config server 'server'
option url 'https://sysupgrade.openwrt.org'
config client 'client'
option upgrade_packages '1'
option auto_search '0'
option advanced_mode '1'
config owut 'owut'
option rootfs_size '470'
and then I am able to use AttendedSysupgrade to build image with all needed packages. Upgrade went smoothly from v23 to v24. Thanks all!