[mkroot] Contribution

[Rob Landley]

On 03/02/2018 04:56 AM, Ruhollah Majdoddin wrote:
> Hello,
> I have spent the past month over mkroot (and native build with QEMU), now I have

What do you think of it so far?

(I need to figure out where to stick more documentation. Possibly github's
project wiki? I'm trying to do this one as an actual github project, because
I've never properly familiarized myself with all the plumbing they offer...)

> free time for one or two months. Where can I contribute?
> If toybox has more priority now (I see more activity there)  please tell me
> where can I contribute there (I have browsed through the roadmap and other
> documentation).
> Regards
> Ruhollah

Hooking up the native toolchains here would be nice, but the lack of a non-gpl
"make" is why I haven't so far. (Eventually I need to implement make for toybox
but that's a solid couple months work. It's also possible I'll need to implement
cmake and/or ninja, but I hope not.)

Getting mkroot to build with alternative toolchains (such as the Android NDK or
https://toolchains.bootlin.com/ or http://ellcc.org or
https://www.kernel.org/pub/tools/crosstool/) might be nice tool. (I'm aware most
of those don't provide native compilers, and yes it is sad.)

What would be really nice for me personally is if you could figure out what's
wrong with qemu's console I/O when serial points to stdin and I do
echo/sleep/echo/sleep chains at it. I want to smoketest mkroot with something
vaguely like:

for i in $(./cross); do (sleep 5; echo date; sleep 1; echo tail '/dev/?da' ;
sleep 1; echo ifconfig; sleep 1; echo exit; sleep 1) | ./run.sh $i -hda log.txt
| tee $i-testlog.txt ; done

But when I try it, current qemu built from git hangs after a command or two. :(

(In theory, driving a qemu child process via tcl/expect or similar is really
useful. In practice it's never quite worked right whenever I've tried it and
I've had to do ssh or booted with an init script that told it what to do and
then to shut down at the end, ala the old
https://landley.net/aboriginal/control-images stuff.)

Rob