Speeding up testing tips?

I’m modifying things for a read-only FS on a raspberry pi, including making sure the right things make it onto the data partition, and between the amount of hardware features I’m using and the trouble I’ve had with qemu, I feel safest just using bmap to flash the resulting sdimg onto the SD card, then swapping the newly written card with the one in my Pi.

Does anyone have any tips for shortening this process? For instance, removing the secondary rootfs partition? I tried deleting the wic line but of course that just made things fail because things were looking for the wrong partition. Decided not to go any further on that, not sure how many issues I’ll run into there.

Is there anything like hosting the image over NFS that could help?
Or maybe some command that will just bmap the primary and data partitions over?

I don’t want to get too far from my ideal image of course, in case I start masking an issue.

Hello @TimFroehlich,

Unfortunately it is hard to accomplish being close to the real thing and fast cycles. Especially when you making changes that affect rootfs and data part.

NFS is ok, but then you typically only server the root filesystem and not extra partitions.

Otherwise qemu will get you fastest iterations if you are not doing board specific changes.