<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small">Thanks Steve!</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small"> </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small">This will be very helpful to me - a clear and simple "lay of the land".</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small"> </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small">I'll try to put this information to use shortly.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small"> </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small">Cheers, Mike</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small"> </div></div><div class="gmail_extra"> <div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 2:04 AM, Steve Langasek <<a href="mailto:steve.langasek@canonical.com" target="_blank">steve.langasek@canonical.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi Mike, On Thu, Sep 08, 2016 at 06:16:58PM -0400, MikeB wrote: > I feel like I am stumbling around in the dark as I'm learning about getting > Ubuntu-Core running on new devices. I'm discovering things in a bottom-up > direction and I think I'm not seeing some basic concepts that Canonical > engineers take for granted. I've trolled through the Ubuntu sites and > mailing lists trying to get good overview and understanding about subjects > but have come up empty or, at best, sparse. Learning about concepts > through a mailing list "keyhole" is very difficult. > > I think I'm way off on my knowledge about the following. > > * Assertions/Model Assertions - I see them mentioned, but have no idea what > they are. > * Gadgets - Again hear and see them a lot, but no clue what they are. How > can I create and use one for my target platforms. > * ubuntu-image - No idea of its status or how to use it. > * ubuntu-device-flash - Using it now from a recipe but don't know much else > about it. Is it obsolete? > Any pointers to good overviews or documentation would be appreciated. > Regards, Mike These are some wonderfully timely questions, that I'm happy to help answer for you! This should also help with the problems of your other post, about the image you've built with ubuntu-device-flash not letting snapd run. To answer the last question first: up until this week, ubuntu-device-flash has been The Way to make ubuntu-core images. However, we've known for some time that this needed to be replaced, and this in-progress replacement is called ubuntu-image. We haven't been writing much about the status of ubuntu-image here because it's been pre-alpha, and would likely only add to people's frustrations around image building. ;) But the images released this week were all made using ubuntu-image, which is a good indicator that it's now ready to be shared more widely. ubuntu-image is now available as a snap. For the moment, it's only on the edge channel and requires devmode, so it can be installed as: sudo snap install --channel=edge --devmode ubuntu-image You can also find the source repository for ubuntu-image at: <a href="https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/ubuntu-image/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/ubuntu-image/</a> Now, ubuntu-image has a number of commandline options, most of which are only of interest if you're working on ubuntu-image itself (we will clean up the --help output soon). The basic usage is just: UBUNTU_IMAGE_SKIP_COPY_UNVERIFIED_MODEL=1 \ ubuntu-image -c edge my-model.assertion -o my_output.img So, what is a model assertion? Others can speak more authoritatively than I can about the definition of a model assertion, but the summary is that this is a text document declaring what should go into your image. Instead of specifying the gadget, kernel, and os snaps as commandline arguments to ubuntu-device-flash, you declare these in the model assertion, which can then be signed and referenced by the store and snapd. If you are making your own image, you will need your own model assertion. You can find some practical examples here: <a href="http://people.canonical.com/~vorlon/amd64-generic-model.assertion" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://people.canonical.com/~vorlon/amd64-generic-model.assertion</a> <a href="http://people.canonical.com/~vorlon/pi2-model.assertion" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://people.canonical.com/~vorlon/pi2-model.assertion</a> These are 90% of the way to what was used in producing this week's images, which should be enough to get you going for your own local builds. Note that current snapd requires model assertions to be signed, so the above include a signature - but the signature is not valid (and obviously won't be valid when you make your changes), thus the need for setting UBUNTU_IMAGE_SKIP_COPY_UNVERIFIED_MODEL=1. And the main thing you're going to want to permute in your model assertion, vs. one of our reference assertions, are the snaps that you're using. You're already using a custom kernel snap; you will also want a custom gadget snap. A gadget snap is a snap that details how the kernel and os snap should be combined into an image for a given device. This includes partition layouts, what bootloader snappy uses (grub or uboot), and how to integrate with the firmware. The backbone of a gadget snap is the meta/gadget.yaml. You can find documentation of this yaml file here: <a href="https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/ubuntu-image/blob/master/docs/gadget-yaml.rst" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/ubuntu-image/blob/master/docs/gadget-yaml.rst</a> And you can find the source for the reference gadget snaps at: <a href="https://code.launchpad.net/~snappy-dev/snappy-hub/snappy-systems/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://code.launchpad.net/~snappy-dev/snappy-hub/snappy-systems/</a> And since ubuntu-image is calling 'snap prepare-image' under the hood to create your ubuntu-core root filesystem, this will also take care of all the problems with /var/lib/snapd/seed in your other mail! Hope that helps, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer <a href="http://www.debian.org/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.debian.org/</a> <a href="mailto:slangasek@ubuntu.com">slangasek@ubuntu.com</a> <a href="mailto:vorlon@debian.org">vorlon@debian.org</a> </blockquote></div> </div>