2.5 KiB
+++ title = "Using OS containers for OpenEmbedded build" date = 2015-06-02 +++
As a user of Arch Linux on laptop and on the server which gets used for OpenEmbedded builds, OpenEmbedded doesn't exactly like rolling release distros. Somehow for whatever reason, current builds just fail. Remember facing the problem when using Arch and learning OpenEmbedded iin the early days which lead to the first OpenEmbedded post. Why? Not having the time to debug such a thing, there was another solution at hand.
The solution is to use a chroot jail or when having systemd as init, that would be resorting to the use of systemd-nspawn. So lets get on how to set up an environment which can be used for builds. Assuming one has yaourt installed,
yaourt -S debootstrap
mkdir ~/debian-root
sudo debootstrap --arch=amd64 --variant=minbase jessie ~/debian-root
sudo systemd-nspawn -D debian-root
The third command is gonna take a while. After running the last command, one would be inside the chroot jail as a root user. After that run the following.
apt-get install update
apt-get install sudo
adduser -uid 1000 -gid 100 username
visudo
su username
Assume you know what to add after running visudo, basically add yourself to the sudoers file. To get the user id and group id for the adduser command, run "id" on host. The last command drops you in the home directory for the newly created user. Whenever wanting to work on OpenEmbedded, just use systemd-nspawn to log in to the Debian environment. This environment can be kept for as long one likes to maintain the build setup while the normal user space can be updated without fear of breaking the build. One can replicate the exact Debian environment by just copying the complete Debian root directory using something like rsync to any number of your machines.
Also do note that Debian isn't the only one you can use. One can do this for Fedora, Arch, and probably other distros too.
Output from the Debian root environment.
sanchayan@debian-root:~/oe-core/build$ uname -a
Linux debian-root 4.0.0-ck1-bfs-ck+ #8 SMP PREEMPT Wed Apr 29 11:35:34 IST 2015 x86_64 GNU/Linux
sanchayan@debian-root:~/oe-core/build$ pwd
/home/sanchayan/oe-core/build
Output of machinectl from the host.
machinectl
MACHINE CLASS SERVICE
debian-root container nspawn
1 machines listed.
systemd for Administrators series should be interesting to you.
Do have a look at the man pages for systemd-nspawn and machinectl.