Support physical devices about mkosi HOT 6 CLOSED

Is this not a feature request for how alot of downstream distribution are doing this with "live" usb/cd ?

Basically you create a image via mkosi, dd it to usb, boot the usb then run something live-cd-to-install.

Could perhaps be a switch that simply adds type ( path? ) units and install to hardrive script run once at bootup to mkosi.extra which then would get build and placed on the image itself?

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@johannbg well... I don't think this is the same thing. Writing directly on the usb device is good for not having to create a separate .raw image just to dd it later to a usb device...

I currently workaround that by estimating a minimal size for my images (usually 2 ~ 5 GB depending on the distro), dd it to the usb device and then resize the last partition (https://github.com/lucasdemarchi/toolbox/blob/master/mkosi-resize). See also #239 - and see @poettering's answer regarding x-systemd.growfs which is already available in systemd since version 236.... that could be adopted here.

But supporting a physical device would be nice, too.

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I think this is now resolved as mkosi uses systemd-repart. I was able to flash an SD card using mkosi from main branch with no issues.

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Can you elaborate? This issue is about having mkosi write directly to a block device, which we don't really support yet. I guess it might work if you point the output file to the block device but I would expect some rough edges.

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I guess it might work if you point the output file to the block device

Yeah, that's what I did, mkosi build --output /dev/mmcblk0, which worked for my use case.

I would expect some rough edges.

I see, nevermind then.

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I'm going to close this one, as supporting physical devices in mkosi is not trivial. Instead, you can ship a set of systemd-repart definition files with your image and then you can run systemd-repart --image <image> /dev/xxx to deploy the image on the physical device after running mkosi. The image can be made minimal and systemd-repart will take care of growing the partitions when deploying to the actual device. With the growfs partition flag enabled systemd will automatically grow the filesystem to match the partition size on boot as well then.

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