Re: [gentoo-user] quick installs on older/embedded hardware

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 04/06/2014 21:16, James wrote:
>  Hello everybody,
> 
> I have a compliment of older x86 and amd64 boxes that I use for
> testing things; new or specialized gentoo offerings and such. Mostly amd64.
> Many of the older ide/ata drive systems have front loaded carriers
> that have quick hot swap feature that make it easy to shut down
> a machine. Swap the hardrive (and carrier cassette) and boot up
> with a differnt OS for testing. Often I use one machine to work 
> on several differnet problems. I try to avoid the VM approach,
> because much of what I work on involves actual hardware issues
> and hardware verifications. 
> 
> I could put a minimal distro, such as  system rescure, on to a usb stick,
> CD/DVD for booting, mount the drive and dd over complete images
> from various places, then a quick reboot to test a drive based distro.
> 
> I have many differnt such gyrations ongoing and I need to deploy
> a singular semanctic for boot a myriad of offering to test/code on.
> 
> To just name a few: pentoo, lilblue, lxqt(4), lxqt(5), wrt,
> embedded gentoo etc etc etc. It seems as though each is a "walk_once"
> exercise and I'm loosing my mind. Throw on top of this, BTRFS, CEPTh
> gluster, xfs, zfs I'm beginning to become too fragmented to stay focused on
> the task(s) at hand.   
> 
> (Side rant) 
> If you read some of my (broken english) postings, they are mostly due to 
> hardware irritants that have the majoring of my limited brain cells
> agitated to the point of illiteracy...... I use gmane  (to post to
> gentoo-user) and it use to have spell checking, or I hacked it, but, for
> what ever reason, spellcheck in gmane seems to be gone now........
> 
> Anyway, I'd like to hear all of the ideas, including various disciplined
> (structured) approaches I can take to minimize uniqueness in my lab and what
> I'm currently doing (mostly). I also have usb sticks, but I've
> found booting various offernings on usb, particularly older hardware, to
> be too biosed_burdened.
> 
> Bear in mind, I also have dozens of embedded boards, some x86, but
> mostly arm based, that are also in the mix. As soon as some less expensive
> arm64 (aarch64) boards become available, those too will become much more
> prevalent in my lab. I need some new organizational (software and Image)
> ideas. My hardware is very well organied on large, open racks with 
> lots of UPS power and easy physical access to each box/board.
> 
> I'm also going to draw things up using (app-admin/rackview).
> If/when  I can take my network security to the next level,
> I'd like to open up 1/2 of the machines to the gentoo community
> for testing and debug on actual hardware. A portal to actuall hardware
> resources. I basically need the ability to move around complete
> system images between differment boxes.
> 
> 
> thoughts and comments are most welcome!



I have no idea how to improve your situation. but I do have a thought:

You are not the only person to deal with this as there are many
manufacturers of embedded items and it must be quite common to test many
images with many hardware setups.

So how do other vendors do it? If we look at their workflow, perhaps a
useable method will filter up through the wetware :-)



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com