Help creating live image

General Discussions
1

Hi Folks

Im trying to create a mender image that i can install on an x86_64 machine that i dont have access to the internal SSD on. I have build and tested the image by booting a live linux usb image and dd’ing the mender image onto the disk but this is not ideal…

this commit https://github.com/mendersoftware/meta-mender/pull/779 suggests that it might be possible to create a live image directly in yocto which uses the initramfs image and can be flashed to the usb key and used to install the image but its not at all clear how this is done. I cant really figure out how this is supposed to be used and there doesnt seem to be any mention of it in the Mender documentation…

any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks
John

2

Hi @johnt I’m not completely understanding what you are trying to accomplish. If you can boot off of a live USB stick then you should be able to use the live installer. That will allow you to boot into the initramfs, then at boot it will enumerate the devices and you choose one to install onto. Since you say you don’t have access to the internal SSD I’m not sure if that will work you. But basically just make sure you are building the HDDIMG image by adding something like the following to local.conf:

IMAGE_FSTYPES_append = " hddimg"

(note the space after the " is intentional and required)

Then just dd that file to your USB key. It should boot to either a grub prompt or a syslinux prompt with two options: Boot and Install.

Drew

3

Hi @drewmoseley

Adding IMAGE_FSTYPE worked - I didn’t realise it was this easy and i really am not sure how this functions but it created exactly what i need!

Thanks for your help!
John

4

Great. This is actually a standard feature in Yocto for X86 machines. We are just modifying it to function with our images.