Here’s a fun problem that I don’t yet have a solution to: I want to build a single image with OE. This image will be my dom0. I want to include other images in this image. That is to say I want to package service VMs as part of / in my dom0.
All of the research I’ve done up till now (all 30 minutes of it) points to this having never been done before. I could be using the wrong keywords but I the ones I tried turned up nothing on the respective OE and Yocto mailing lists. There seem to be a huge number of pitfalls here including things like changing the DISTRO_FEATURES in effect for the images as well as selecting image specific files for packages. On a few occasions I’ve used the distro name as a way to select specific configuration files like an fstab or interfaces.
What I want is to run bitbake once for the dom0 image and have it build all the other images and install them as packages in dom0. So I’d need to have recipes that actually package the images so they can be installed in another image. I think that will be the easy part.
The hard part will be making packages specific to each image with different files specific to the image. The only thing I can come up with for this is to play ugly tricks like building each VM image with a different MACHINE type but I’m not even sure if that will work. I guess all I can do for now is to experiment a bit and get on the mailing list to make sure I’m not duplicating work that’s already been done. This could get ugly.
technomasochism 