Re: [PATCH v7 5/6] meta-isar: install expand-on-first-boot in most images and add space

["Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglietta@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2022 at 09:55, Henning Schild <henning.schild@siemens.com> wrote:
>
> Here we take the most common and generic images and add some empty space
> at the end of then.
> This will enable better interactive use of our example images since
> people will have some space to install some more packages. While the
> space seems fixed it really is open end if the mass storage happens to be
> bigger, because we install expand-on-first-boot as well.

[...]

> +++ b/meta-isar/scripts/lib/wic/canned-wks/expand-padding.wks.inc
> @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
> +# some extra space we put in the end after the last partition
> +# that allows testing expand-on-first-boot while at the same time
> +# making our images more useful because they have space to play around
> +
> +part --source empty --no-table --ondisk sda --size 256M

This approach works only if the expand last partition is installed and
works but only after the first boot into a device or a virtual
machine.

Otherwise this space will remain unavailable. For example, if someone
chroot into wic image for applying some changes s/he wants to test
before integrating into a recipe.

An alternative to add extra space into the disk, is to add it directly
into the rootfs with these two last options:

part / --source rootfs [...] --extra-space 1G --overhead-factor 1.2

I developed wicshell.sh in order to automatize the operations of
chroot into the .wic image and also sharing a folder with the host
which is always useful when ssh/scp is not available.

https://github.com/robang74/isar-nvidia-debian/blob/main/wicshell.sh

Moreover, I saw that there are .conf files for producing vmdk and ova
files. IMHO, a more general and flexible approach is to create these
files directly from the .wic image, like in my project

wicinst vmdk:$filename.vmdk [disk_size_in_gigabytes]

wicinst ovaf:$filename.ova [disk_size_in_gigabytes]

https://github.com/robang74/isar-nvidia-debian/blob/main/wicinst.sh

I hope you are going to take in consideration this approach to
simplify the access of these functionalities which are documented into
my project README.md

Every suggestion and critic in order to improve this approach will be welcome.

Best regards, R-