Hello
To celebrate the newly released SDK we present some fun experimental
science from the Jolla Airship Research Laboratories. As you might guess
the following is very much not supported, and might break, maybe even
spectacularly. Proceed at your own risk.
We have looked into running the Mer build machine in a container rather
than in VirtualBox on Linux hosts. The main reason for this is
performance improvements due to the following:
- a container sees all CPUs on the machine
- a container sees all the RAM on the machine
- no virtual machine disk access penalty
After some experimenting we got this working so you can build working
RPMs in a container sdk machine. If you want to try it yourself, here
are the instructions. Note that this requires a fairly new Linux
installation. As an example Ubuntu versions older than 15/04 do not work.
For this we use the vdi image that comes with SailfishOS SDK. First
create a subdirectory and cd into it. Then do this to mount the image
(use sufficient amount of sudo/su according to taste):
cp ~/SailfishOS/mersdk/mer.vdi .
mkdir mersdk
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 mer.vdi
mount /dev/nbd0p1 mersdk
The build engine is set up so that it expects to be running inside
VirtualBox. We need to alter it a bit to work standalone. First tell
systemd that this directory is a full operating system install:
touch mersdk/etc/os-release
Then edit the ssh config file to allow password login and use port 22
(obviously you can set it up according to your own taste).
nano mersdk/etc/ssh/sshd_config_engine
Remove an unneeded vbox dependency:
rm
mersdk/etc/systemd/system/sshd.service.requires/etc-ssh-authorized_keys.mount
That should be it. Now we can start the container:
systemd-nspawn -bD mersdk
Note that there is a bug in Ubuntu at least where the console becomes
unresponsive after a boot. There's a separate bug so that 'machinectl
login' does not work. So we need to use ssh:
ssh -lnemo 10.0.1.10 (password nemo)
su
Now you have root login to a running MerSDK instance and you can
configure it up to your liking. As an example set a password for the
mersdk user or put your public key in authorized_keys.
To compile you need to put your code so that the mersdk user can see it.
This can be done with scp, a git checkout, bind mounting a directory
from outside the container or whatever you prefer.
After all that building a package is simple:
mb2 -t SailfishOS-armv7hl build (in your source root as user mersdk)
When you are done, log out and shutdown the container:
machinectl poweroff mersdk
Do try it out and let us know if it a) works and b) makes things better
for you. Just remember that if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. :)
Thanks and enjoy,
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