User:Silasb/Erch

Erch is Embedded Arch

Being able to build a small image of arch for embedded purposes.

Build chroot

Start by building a chroot via the devtools package.

# mkarchroot -n -C pacman.conf -M makepkg-i686.conf $HOME/erch/rootfs base

After this completes then you need to package it up.

$ cd rootfs/
$ tar -zcf ../rootfs.tgz .

Now we create an ext[2,3,4] image

dd if=/dev/zero of=rootfs.ext3 bs=1MB count=0 seek=1024 # seek=1024 = 1GB while seek=2048 = 2GB etc
mkfs.ext3 -F rootfs.ext3
mkdir mnt
sudo mount -o loop rootfs.ext3 mnt
tar -C mnt -zxf rootfs.tgz

This is the root file system of our arch image.

To test I used qemu.

qemu -hda rootfs.ext3 -kernel rootfs/boot/vmlinuz-linux -initrd root/boot/initramfs-linux.img append "root=/dev/sda"

It took a while to boot and ran into some errors about a read only file system.

What's next

Getting a minimal group (pacman -S minimal)

Different categories for minimal:

minimal-	packages
busybox	busybox
uclibc	uclibc

• Making build scripts to ease the pain of all these commands. I really like the installer for Arch so maybe something similar to that.
• getting ABS going to rebuild the system to makepkg specs.