This allows ARM compiled binaries in the chroot to execute as if they were running on an ARM machine. It achieves this by copying the QEMU static ARM emulator into the chroot environment. Save the customized chroot environment to a new image.Run the commands you specify in a chroot environment with ARM emulation.Fetch a base ARM os image such as Raspbian or Arch Linux.Packer-builder-arm extends Packer to build arm based images. Today we are going to explore a builder plugin called packer-arm-builder. Read the Packer plugins page for more details.
#QEMU RASPBERRY PI INSTALL#
Provisioners handle the changes you make at the OS level such as install package. Builders are focused on setting up the infrastructure required to build the image. Two examples of plugin types for Packer are builders and provisioners. Packer plugins are just stand alone binaries or scripts that Packer executes. Packer’s plugin architecture is quite simple. Packer supports plugins for extending its functionality. The only reasonable way to achieve this is with the automation that tools like Packer provide. OS image builds need to be automated and tested in an environments of this scale. In these environments you often have thousands of machines. Packer is commonly used in large scale cloud environments. You can now take that image and re-use it on multiple machines. Then capture the output in an image artifact. Boot or chroot into the image and run commands or scripts to customize it. Start with base installation media or a base image of operating system. Packer automates a simple but powerful concept. You can take this even further by setting up CI/CD pipelines to run your builds automatically. If you need to add a new package, just add it to your packer build files and re-run packer. You can store your Packer files in git and now you have a repeatable process. Packer builds your image for you applying your customization. Packer enables you to codify your OS configuration and customization. However each time you want to tweak your configuration you still need to manually re-run the process. It does not scale well to many devices.Ī common solution is to customize your OS install and then clone the SD card or storage device. However repeating this process is time consuming and error prone. Manually running these commands for one device is no big deal. For example you might change config files or install some packages. Why build your Raspberry Pi image with Packer? Projects with embedded devices such as a Raspberry Pi often need tweaks to the OS installation. The boards directory of the packer-builder-arm project show some of the boards you can build images for. Specifically it copies a statically built QEMU arm emulator into the image which allows us to run files compiled for ARM inside the chroot on an X86 system. To do this it leverages arm emulation available in QEMU. This means you don’t need your Raspberry Pi handy to build a Raspbian ARM image. Additionally packer-builder-arm enables you to build these image on your local machine, cloud server or other x86 hardware. Packer is tool from Hashicorp for automating OS image builds. It extends Packer to support ARM platforms including Raspberry Pi. Packer-builder-arm is a plugin for Packer. Today we are test driving packer-builder-arm, this tool enables you to build a Raspberry Pi image with Packer (in addition to other ARM platforms). Introduction: Building a Raspberry Pi image with Packer Build your Raspberry Pi image with Packer.Understand the contents of raspbian.json.Building and installing packer-builder-arm.Introduction: Building a Raspberry Pi image with Packer.