[Centos-automotive-sig] Weekly update on the automotive-sig

Fri May 6 18:10:25 UTC 2022
Pierre-Yves Chibon <pingou at pingoured.fr>

Good Morning Everyone,

So here are some of the changes that we have worked on this week:

* Automatic resize of the '/' partition on raspberry pi

Last week we worked on documenting how to resize the '/' partition after
flashing an image onto a SD card for a raspberry pi.
This week we worked on automatizing this.
There is now a `pi_resize` RPM package, included by default on all of our
raspberry pi images that will automatically resize the `/` partition to the
full size of the SD card upon first boot (and will only do it once).
Let us know if it doesn't work for you!

* Encrypted images

We have work on documentation on how to build images encrypted with luks.
You can find it at: https://sigs.centos.org/automotive/building/encryption/


* Reducing linux-firwmare

The linux-firmware package is a pretty big package containing binary firmware
blob for a number of systems and cards, many more systems than those relevant
for the automotive industry.

We have thus split out some of the firmware from the linux-firmware package
into a custom, smaller, `linux-firmware-automotive` package.
Our images now use that package by default, however, if you want/need to use
the full linux-firmware package, you can use the `linux_firmware_rpm` template
variable to change the package name.


* Raspberry pi as an USB gadget:

An USB gadget is a mechanism by which one can interact with a device connected
over USB as if it was a device connected on the network.

To achieve this and make it convenient, we have adjusted the kernel-automotive
configuration [1] to support the `libcomposite` module. We have also introduced
a `pi_gadget` RPM package, which is available in the Automotive SIG's RPM
repository. That package provides a script and a systemd service to
automatically turn your raspberry pi into an USB gadget.

If you are curious about the experience, feel free to look at our documentation
at: https://sigs.centos.org/automotive/building/gadget/ and do let us know if
you run into any troubles!



Happy hacking!

Pierre


[1] https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-stream-9/-/merge_requests/628