PinePhone First Impressions & Questions

[Norman Feske]

Hi John,

> I am itching to try the various presets, and was wondering if any of the 
> following ideas would be feasible:
> 
> - Providing an on-disk depot for the presets.  (Excluding the web 
> browser, which would be useless without connectivity anyway, seems like 
> it would keep the size down.)

since you are building Sculpt images manually, you can craft an 
offline-usable image with the following tweaks.

- Slim down Sculpt in 'allwinner/sculpt/phone-pinephone.sculpt'.
   For a start, I would leave out all presets except for nano3d (for
   testing) and also remove the launchers.

- Add the following line to 'phone-pinephone.sculpt':

   ram_fs: depot

   This tells Sculpt's RAM file system to mount a tar archive as a pre-
   populated depot when started (it selects the config snippet at [1]).

- Build sculpt with 'DEPOT=tar' instead of 'DEPOT=omit'. This will
   integrate all depot content in the form of a tar file into the image.
   At runtime, this tar archive can then get picked up by the RAM file
   system.

After booting the fresh baked scenario (using fastboot [2] is much 
recommended), select the "ram fs" component in the runtime graph and 
activate "Use". This way, Sculpt will use the RAM file system as Sculpt 
partition and thereby use the pre-populated depot. Now, you should be 
able to activate the nano3d preset.

[1] 
https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/blob/master/repos/gems/sculpt/ram_fs/depot
[2] https://genodians.org/nfeske/2021-09-20-pine-fun-pinephone-boot

That's my usual work flow during Sculpt-image integration work. It does 
not touch the SD-card at all, which is very convenient for iterating 
quickly and crafting presents one by one.

It would be very cool if you get it to work because it opens up a lot of 
opportunities for experimentation.

Cheers
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

https://www.genode-labs.com · https://genode.org

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