Gadget snaps

[mardy]

Hi! We’ve got a case where the system failed to boot because an extra partition was inserted between ubuntu-save and the ubuntu-data partitions. This is not supported at the moment as explained in the forum thread, so the solution is to place any extra partitions before the ubuntu-boot one.

This is probably something that should be mentioned in the documentation: in the volumes/structures map, ubuntu-data needs to be the last partition and no extra partitions can be inserted between the sequence ubuntu-boot - ubuntu-save - ubuntu-data: if extra partitions are required, they need to be declared before ubuntu-boot.

[degville]

@mardy

: in the volumes/structures map, ubuntu-data needs to be the last partition and no extra partitions can be inserted between the sequence ubuntu-boot - ubuntu-save - ubuntu-data: if extra partitions are required, they need to be declared before ubuntu-boot.

Thanks for clarifying this - I’ve updated the volumes mapping sub-section to include your text.

[alexclewontin]

Hi,

Looks like we’ve got a contradiction here:

The volumes: section is initially listed as “required”

@wiki

• volumes (YAML sub-section, required): the volumes layout, where each disk image is represented as a YAML sub-section.

But later described as “optional”

@wiki

The following specification defines what is supported in gadget.yaml:

gadget.yaml

...

# Volumes defining the structure and content for the images to be written
# into one or more block devices of the gadget device. Each volume in
# in the structure represents a different image for a "disk" in the device.
# (optional)
volumes:

...

It looks like none of the tooling objects if you leave the volume out, so this may be relevant to Classic use-cases, but in any case these should be consistent

[kdn-3dystems]

I am trying to build a gadget snap so that I can install some drivers but I can’t get the sample version to create a snap. I was hoping to start with a working sample version and add my driver installation steps. I followed the steps here:

Building a gadget snap | Ubuntu

I modified the steps to use the pc-gadget instead of the pi-gadget. This is what I did:

$ git clone https://github.com/snapcore/pc-gadget $ cd pc-gadget $ git checkout 20 $ snapcraft

It fails to build the snap. It fails with the following error:

the package grub-efi-amd64-signed has unmet dependencies: Run the same command again with --debug to shell into the environment if you wish to introspect this failure.

Why does this fail? How can I fix it? Am I doing something wrong?

I am trying to evaluate whether or not we can use Ubuntu Core. I have a snap for our firmware working and I am using ubuntu-frame to output to 2 monitors but now I need to install drivers for a special touch screen monitor that we use.

[ogra]

i’m working on a more generalized set of gadgets for customization that simply re-use the existing gadgets as stage-snap’s without re-building anything to avoid exactly these probs… feel free to be my guinea pig :

https://github.com/ogra1/custom-pc-gadget/

[kdn-3dystems]

Thanks for this. I am using Ubuntu Core 20 so I changed the stage-snaps: to pc/20/stable. I also changed the base from core22 to core20. When I change the base to 20 the snap no longer builds. I get this error message:

Issues while validating snapcraft.yaml: The ‘hooks/prepare-device/environment/MODEL_APIKEY’ property does not match the required schema: ‘’ is not of type ‘number’ or ‘’ is too short

Kevin

[ogra]

oops, sorry, i have not done a core20 branch yet (and will not get to look into that today) … there might be a few more changes needed …

[kdn-3dystems]

OK. Let me know when you have something.

[Saviq]

I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be fixed because of the “this is a read-only copy” on the other side, but the “system options” link here is broken:

https://ubuntu.com/core/docs/gadget-snaps#heading--kernel

It points at the topic on this forum here:

System options

Snap supports a set of system-wide options that allow you to customise your snap or Ubuntu Core environment. These are listed below. See Setting system options for further details on how they they are viewed and configured. Supported options pi-config system homedirs system journal.persistent system proxy.{http,https,ftp} system refresh system resilience.vitality-hint system service.console-conf.disable system service.ssh.disable system service.ssh.listen-address system snaps…

But the docs page is rendered from Gadget snaps - Ubuntu Core docs - Ubuntu Community Hub I believe? That’s where the “Help improve…” link points… but then that says it’s a read-only copy!

[degville]

Thanks so much for letting us know. I’ve just fixed this. The problem is that these two pages are identical, apart from their relative links, and this is the canonical copy so that edits aren’t copied back-and-forth. This isn’t a great solution and it probably makes more sense to move this to Ubuntu Core docs only.

[dilyn]

I don’t believe that size is optional in a gadget.yaml (anymore?) Attempting to pack a gadget snap with size omitted for some bare part in the gadget.yaml yields:

dilyn@Ares:~/work/canonical/iot-field/gadget-snaps -> snap pack squashfs-root/
error: cannot pack "squashfs-root/": invalid volume "nezha": invalid structure #0 ("spl"): missing size

Relevant snippet:

volumes:
  nezha:
    schema: gpt
    bootloader: grub
    structure:
      - name: spl
        type: bare
        offset: 131072
        # size: 65536
        content:
          - image: nezha-boot0_sdcard_sun20iw1p1.bin
      - name: ubuntu-seed
        role: system-seed
        filesystem: vfat
        type: EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
        size: 800M
        offset: 40M
        content:
          - source: grubriscv64.efi
            target: EFI/boot/grubriscv64.efi
      - name: ubuntu-boot
        role: system-boot
        filesystem: ext4
        type: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4
        size: 800M
        content:
        content:
          - source: grubriscv64.efi
            target: EFI/boot/grubriscv64.efi
      - name: ubuntu-save
        role: system-save
        filesystem: ext4
        type: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4
        size: 16M
      - name: ubuntu-data
        role: system-data
        filesystem: ext4
        type: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4
        size: 1M

defaults:
  system:
    watchdog:
      runtime-timeout: 16s
      shutdown-timeout: 1m

[bugraaydogar]

@degville could you please mention that the cloud-init is only suggested for development and we strongly recommend not using it for production since it is essentially designed for cloud based systems and super powerful in a way that a developer can customize the underlying OS heavily. Also, it introduces some additional delays while booting the system which impacts overall boot time of the device which is an important topic for the embedded systems.

[degville]

@dilyn Thanks for raising this. In the top-level of structure, it does say size is required, but you’re right that later for content is implies it’s optional (I’m guessing this is what you’re referencing?). I’ve now removed this.

@bugraaydogar Thanks for letting me know about cloud-init. I’ve updated the cloud-init entry to hopefully make it clear that its use is not recommended for production devices.

[kris]

Hi we have just come across the volume “min-size” property and noticed its not mentioned / referenced in the documentation. But this has really helped us when trying to update a gadget in which we would like new devices to have a larger partition size but while also being compatible with the devices that already exist.

Thanks Kris

[degville]

Hello! Thanks for letting us know. I’ve made a note to ask the team about the proper specific definition for min-size and make sure this is added to the doc. I’ll update this post when it’s done.

[farshidtz]

Is this document an old copy of Gadget snaps | Ubuntu?

There an issue here, listing the example as one of gadget contents:

Thanks