FAI for ARM image building

[Thomas Lange]

Hi Riku,

now I had a look at your linaro fai config space. Here are my comments:

First I tried to call the fai-diskimage command using your config
space. It failed when calling debootstrap :-(
So I found a little bug in FAI 5.4 and fixed it :-)
https://github.com/faiproject/fai/commit/efbb5a8448b6b04d9f3be74e32a222b2c8e6a09a

class/INSTALL.var is not needed for fai-diskimage. This is only used
when you use the curses menu which reads the class/*.profile files.
The other files in class/ look good.

I wonder why you use a fixed size (4GB) in disk_config/RAW. I would
say "4GB-" which does not define an upper bound and is therefore more
general.

The files in package_config are well partitioned into classes.

Instead of files/etc/hostname/DEBIAN and the preinst, I would just use
this code: echo $HOSTNAME > $target/etc/hostname

Thanks for showing me the envsubst command in several preinst files. I
didn't knew this one. It's easier than what's currently used in the FAI
preinst examples.

The scripts DB820C/21-customize and DB410C/21-customize share some
lines of code. Keep in mind, that duplicating code is bad, and think
about putting the duplicated code into a more general FAI class, which
is then used everytime you use the DB820C and DB410C class.

The wget of the firmware zip file will put and extract the files into
the current working directory as root. I would use /tmp for that.

In several scripts you use "chroot $target" which should be replaced
just by $ROOTCMD, which is the same (except if you call fai
softupdate, which is then empty).

For things like "echo string >> file" you could use ainsl(1).

In 22-disable-systemd-services.chroot I wonder why you use an array
instead of just a space separated string like this:
services="NetworkManager systemd-networkd"
for service in ${services}; do
  $ROOTCMD systemctl mask ${service}-wait-online.service
done

Silimar is valid for 02-add_linaro_to_groups.chroot where you redefine
IFS instead of separating the list of DEFGROUP just by spaces.


The hook debconf.SAVECACHE is not needed IMO. If there's a basefile
matching a class name in the subdirectory basefiles/, then FAI will
automatically use it and will not call debootstrap. If you define
something linke this
export FAI_BASEFILEURL=https://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/
the first time you call fai-diskimage, FAI will download a basefile
(matching a class name) into the subdir and the second time you call
fai-diskimage FAI will just use this file automatically.

My overall impression is very good! All the things I said are just
minor cosmetic details.


Finally I've created a SID_ARM64.tar.xz basefile and ran fai-diskimage
with the new cross-arch support using your config space on a Amd64
machine which finished in 289 seconds. I used FAI 5.4 with the one
patch I mentioned above. How long does it take on a native Arm64
machine?

-- 
regards Thomas