Hello, this is a weekly report for my GSoC’22 project Building Bela Images. My mentors are Giulio Moro, Vedant Paranjape,Vaishnav Achath and from now this thread will be updated weekly.
Youtube Video: Introductory Video of the project
Blog Link: https://krvprashanth.in/gsoc2022
These two week I couldn’t progress much, spent most hours on resolving build errors and downloading source to my build machine and understand the workflows of both bela-image-builder and BeagleBoard Image builder repos to reproduce Bela and BeagleBoard Images and I was not much clear about my project timeline, and struggled a bit to get started and things were not excepted as thought.
After going through both Bela and Beagleboard Image builders workflows. I came to know how useful is to use package management while building these GNU/Linux distributions.
Most of the bela software was distributed this way, as git clone and that required compiling, Installing in build process. In bela image development installing some software manually requires a very conscious effort to and one need to know when changes are made and obtain them in a useful form and be careful during the updates/upgrades in order to not loose custom configuration information or to break the existing configuration and also need to make sure that files that are no longer needed are removed in a timely fashion and the new version does not conflict with other software on the system and also when software is removed, all traces are gone except configuration files that would be hard to replace if the software is later re-installed.
Further more, many libraries and header files may be needed on the system to compile from source. Besides the difficulty in obtaining them, and wasting of disk space, version clashes are quite common and cause one to pull one’s hair out. As in beagleboard Image development debian packaging system taking care of all these issues and packaging system present a far better alternative and it is one of the main roles a linux distribution performs.
bela-image-builder has no package management like beagleboard-image-builder and anyhow, most of the embedded linux distributions were collection of tarballs, of either binaries or sources which required compilation. Embedded distributions ( like bela ) still work this way. However, this method has many disadvantages and updates and upgrades can be very difficult, for a number of reasons files which are no longer needed may remain on the system and in place upgrades done while the system is running may cause difficulties and even system crashes and the software that require simultaneous updating may conflict with each other.
Sophisticated modern package management systems like the one which beagleboard-image-builder and debian has tremendous improvements. Packaging system makes easy for repeatable builds as in my case in first week I’m able to reproduce beagleboard images with ease while it took me so much time on resolving in build errors to reproduce bela image and also packaging system preserve customized and modified configuration files while updates and upgrades. Simple installation and removal methods. That’s were in week 2 I started packaging bela required dependencies to include in the apt package manager that used in beagleboard-image-builder.
Final Exams - No Code
In weekly meet mentor suggested to work on building sample bela image with omap-image-builder scripts first in order to verify, test and does it possible to build bela Images and later focus on packaging Bela required dependencies.
root user, make it the default user, with no password and also delete the debian user that would be there as defaultmake EXAMPLE=Fundamentals/sinetone in the Bela folder and it should workBuilt bela-bullseye Image with omap-image-builder scripts
Tested the built bela-bullseye Image
Add these files to Bela Image build scripts in omap-image-builder
bela-image-builder/misc/rootfs/lib/systemd/systembela-image-builder/misc/rootfs/opt/Belabela-image-builder/misc/rootfs have a reason to be there.And also those in
/lib/system : copy them over and enable bela_button, bela_ide (systemctl enable bela_button bela_ide)/opt/Bela: copy them over/root : copy them over/etc: need to be checked one by one to see what special settings have been appliedbela_gadget files
/lib/systemd/system/bela_flash_emmc.service and /opt/Bela/bela_flash_emmc.sh has similar problems.
July 25 - July 31
python2 dependencies of pip2, enum, jinja2 and Debian 11 (bullseye) has removed the " python package and the /usr/bin/python symlink due to the deprecation of Python 2… though it has minimal support for python 2.7 adjusted everything for python3-<package name> ( updated python3 version of hvcc and added dependency package tox in bela-bullseye conf ) and also removed enum package that no more it required.systemd
2 package/week (taking a comfortable room, if some package needs more work).
August 1 - August 7
Work on last week pending targets
Debian package updated/packaged.
Build a bela-bullseye Image with all the changes made in upstream repo (omap-image-builder) by Aug 5 and after build test the Image and debug if it needs.
Make some more Bela specific changes in omap-image-builder scripts and also to make sure Bela Image Development follows the workflow of omap-image builder build process.