Pi-gen Micro

Future Directions

Automatic udeb generation

Investigate Debian tooling to automatically turn packages into udebs. udebs are heavily cut-down (even omitting uninstall scripts) and may be ideal for systems that are upgraded at the block device level.

Upgrade d-i media in-place

The d-i environment has a udeb version of dpkg, udpkg (which is only 31 kB installed). Investigate possibility of an in-place upgrade from a udeb-based system to something debootstrap would generate. This could be a 'stage 0.5' of pi-gen.

Whilst udebs are not designed to be removed/upgraded/replaced, their install paths should not conflict with those of regular .deb files as multiarch is not supported.

The existing d-i has an hd-media option; this should be investigated as a starting point. == cryptroot image Kernel modules must be copied into the image:

BUILD_DIR=$(realpath build)/
pushd <rootfs>
sudo find usr/lib/modules \( -name 'dm-mod.*' -o -name 'dm-crypt.*' -o -name 'af_alg.*' -o -name 'algif_skcipher.*' -o -name 'libaes.*' -o -name 'aes_generic.*' -o -name 'aes-arm64.*' \) -exec cp -r --parents "{}" ${BUILD_DIR} \;
popd

Future Directions

Automatic udeb generation

Investigate Debian tooling to automatically turn packages into udebs. udebs are heavily cut-down (even omitting uninstall scripts) and may be ideal for systems that are upgraded at the block device level.

Upgrade d-i media in-place

The d-i environment has a udeb version of dpkg, udpkg (which is only 31 kB installed). Investigate possibility of an in-place upgrade from a udeb-based system to something debootstrap would generate. This could be a 'stage 0.5' of pi-gen.

Whilst udebs are not designed to be removed/upgraded/replaced, their install paths should not conflict with those of regular .deb files as multiarch is not supported.

The existing d-i has an hd-media option; this should be investigated as a starting point. == cryptroot image Kernel modules must be copied into the image:

BUILD_DIR=$(realpath build)/
pushd <rootfs>
sudo find usr/lib/modules \( -name 'dm-mod.*' -o -name 'dm-crypt.*' -o -name 'af_alg.*' -o -name 'algif_skcipher.*' -o -name 'libaes.*' -o -name 'aes_generic.*' -o -name 'aes-arm64.*' \) -exec cp -r --parents "{}" ${BUILD_DIR} \;
popd

TODO

• Spurious errors from apt

• dpkg potentially leaking to host system (logs, etc)

• libc6-udeb (minimal installer version of libc6) is in use. The consequences of this have not been fully explored. Only a subset of shared libraries are installed with this package.

• update-alternatives: Should be possible to use the host version in a 'cross' manner (DPKG_ROOT et al. are respected)

• Consider dpkg-hooks to reduce package size; these could also remove initramfs hooks/scripts.

• Consider using busybox-udeb in pi-gen-micro

• Investigate apt-install utility in debian-installer-utils as an alternative to 'tricking' apt/dpkg

• Investigate using udpkg/anna instead of dpkg/apt

• Consider using rootskel rather than base-files and cryptsetup-udeb instead of cryptsetup.

• Automatic udeb downloader…​ or make use of tooling from d-i.

Dependencies

pi-gen-micro is expected to run on any recent raspberry pi. To use the app you must have textual and textual[syntax]

$ pip install textual
$ pip install "textual[syntax]"

Then need to run

./init.sh

which will set up the configurations directory