Adding a new x86 image or related packages to the default x86 image

[Philip Prindeville]

> On Sep 14, 2023, at 5:19 PM, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann <s.l-h at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> On 2023-09-14, Paul Spooren wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I’d like to merge the PR which adds the Mellanox Spectrum SN2100 to 
>> OpenWrt[1]. In its current state a new x86 image would be added next 
>> to the generic x86 image. Another approach is to add all related 
>> packages to the default image. Either way creates a working image.
>> 
>> I remember that people were complaining about a “bloated” x86 image 
>> which slows down their container/VM needs. So what would be a simple 
>> way forward here?
> [...]
> 
> If at all reasonably possible (assuming the size increase is roughly in
> the ball park  of 1-2 MB for the total image), I'd suggest to stick to a 
> single x86_64 image for maintenance and testing reasons alone. The bump
> of the x86 targets to kernel v6.1 -while easy- is mostly stalled due to
> there being three 32 bit x86 sub-targets and the need to go through the
> kernel config rebase three times, which is wearing thin the patience and 
> motivation of doing so (x86_64 alone would have been ready >2 months 
> ago). Unless these SN2100 devices suddenly become a cheap commodity and 
> ubiquitous among OpenWrt developers and -users, I fear that it would 
> just add to this churn and pretty much rot away in the tree, while at 
> the same time making progress harder for the other x86{,_64} devices.
> 
> Regards
> Stefan Lippers-Hollmann


Sometime back I tried to add "pcituils" and "usbutils" to the generic x86_64 image, and was told that they weren't sufficiently "ubiquitous" to add to the default image.

I note that they can be removed from the BOM easily by doing:

DEVICE_PACKAGES += -pciutils -usbutils

And that would remove them if they were already present in $(DEVICE_PACKAGES).

I've never encountered an x86_64 platform that didn't have both USB and PCI, as they've without question become a "cheap commodity".

Contrarily, I've yet to own or operate a platform that has a Mellanox switch.  This seems arbitrary.

-Philip