What an amazing piece of software OpenWRT is. I cannot be happier using it on a repurposed x86 device as a router. Customisable, secure and effective for a lot a network related tasks. We are lucky to have community of developers who give their time to make it better year-on-year.
I have a request. Could the firmware selector website give us the ability to request a certain sized partition for the root partition on X86 builds? This would eliminate the need to manually resize the root partition using tools such as GParted or rootfs.
I'm probably naive to think that it could be a straightforward implementation, but one may dream.
You are right, it might require more storage for generating and storing those images. I am curious how much more storage this will add? Are the x86 builds that popular? This would also only apply to people who would want to use the option too I imagine?
Another option is to implement a self extend of the root fs during 1st boot, at least for the ext4 platform, where's it's easier to do, and doesn't require much from the image building servers.
Just to be clear, if I followed the automated route, I would only need to run the following on ssh command line interface on first bootup?: uclient-fetch -O expand-root.sh "https://openwrt.org/_export/code/docs/guide-user/advanced/expand_root?codeblock=0" . ./expand-root.sh
I am presupposing that uclient-fetch is already included in the standard x86 build.
That command only creates autostart scripts to avoid possible errors and typos.
You also need to preinstall the packages and run the script as mentioned in the examples section.
That is not entirely true. The extra space is zeroed out and compressed, so the final image is not that bigger. It does require more space to generate images and might slowdown the build due to having to zero out extra space, but it might not be noticeable.
I would love to have this feature in the online builder. I am struggling to compile one on my own machine due to weird errors and I'm a newbie so having the ability to specify a root partition size would be fantastic.
Hi all
I just came across Overriding CONFIG_TARGET_ROOTFS_PARTSIZE in Image Builder
and it seems like this is some sort of bug. I edited the .config file and specified 512 for the rootfs partition and built the image and it actually generated one.
Looks like this is a bug. Is this the right place to report this?
What if the install process were made to be just like regular OS's?
If there were an .ISO that could be made into a bootable USB. The PC or PI etc could be then booted into an interactive installer what would give the ability to select partitioning and other options at time of setup. ( just like you do when installing Windows or Ubuntu, etc. )
It could also include integrated support for commonly needed packages and dependencies for USB network adapters which are usually going to be required for the second NIC on laptop or Pi installs.
( i.e. the kmod / usb-net ipks and dependecies, realtek firmware, etc. )
Writing an installer (and all the orchestration around that, like the ISO stuff) would be an x86_64-only development (and quite a lot of that), while the main focus of OpenWrt is very much elsewhere. Chances for this to happen are low, very low.
Thanks for the reply. That makes sense. Initially, I was just wondering if there might be existing open-source code out there for installers and ISO utilities that could perhaps be modified without having to start from scratch. I see the point though that it's really beyond the scope of OpenWRT.