diskimage-builder/diskimage_builder/elements/architecture-emulation-binaries/README.rst
Ian Wienand 97c01e48ed Move elements & lib relative to diskimage_builder package
Currently we have all our elements and library files in a top-level
directory and install them into
<root>/share/diskimage-builder/[elements|lib] (where root is either /
or the root of a virtualenv).

The problem with this is that editable/development installs (pip -e)
do *not* install data_files.  Thus we have no canonical location to
look for elements -- leading to the various odd things we do such as a
whole bunch of guessing at the top of disk-image-create and having a
special test-loader in tests/test_elements.py so we can run python
unit tests on those elements that have it.

data_files is really the wrong thing to use for what are essentially
assets of the program.  data_files install works well for things like
config-files, init.d files or dropping documentation files.

By moving the elements under the diskimage_builder package, we always
know where they are relative to where we import from.  In fact,
pkg_resources has an api for this which we wrap in the new
diskimage_builder/paths.py helper [1].

We use this helper to find the correct path in the couple of places we
need to find the base-elements dir, and for the paths to import the
library shell functions.

Elements such as svc-map and pkg-map include python unit-tests, which
we do not need tests/test_elements.py to special-case load any more.
They just get found automatically by the normal subunit loader.

I have a follow-on change (I69ca3d26fede0506a6353c077c69f735c8d84d28)
to move disk-image-create to a regular python entry-point.

Unfortunately, this has to move to work with setuptools.  You'd think
a symlink under diskimage_builder/[elements|lib] would work, but it
doesn't.

[1] this API handles stuff like getting files out of .zip archive
modules, which we don't do.  Essentially for us it's returning
__file__.

Change-Id: I5e3e3c97f385b1a4ff2031a161a55b231895df5b
2016-11-01 17:27:41 -07:00

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===============================
architecture-emulation-binaries
===============================
This element enables execution for different architectures
When building an image for an architecture that the host machine
can not execute, we need to chroot into the image to execute code,
and if the host architecture does not match, we need to emulate
the instructions.
This element does the following:
* copies the binary file into chroot /usr/bin environment.
Binary file is chosen based on host architecture and
image architecture the user is trying to build.
If an image we are building for an architecture is not the host
architecture, install tools provided by qemu-user-static
(which needs to be installed) to allow us to run commands
inside the building image.
This is tested on amd64/i386 architecture to build armhf and arm64
ubuntu cloud images.