hwpackforvendors.md
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Signed-off-by: 
Martyn Welch <martyn.welch@collabora.com>date = "2019-11-25"
weight = 100
title = "User:Peter HWPACKforVendors"
aliases = [
"/old-wiki/User:Peter/HWPACKforVendors"
]Apertis hwpack: requirements for vendors
This is the output of APERTIS-6608.
Introduction
Adding support to a new architecture, or to a new board is done trough cycles of hardware bring-up. During each cycle, the developer enables new features, or fixes known issues until the hardware support is considered adequate. On a low level perspective, hardware bring-up is about developing and adjusting a few components such as the boot loader and the kernel to provide the hardware initialization and hardware support for the operating system. When using Apertis, the output of the hardware bring-up will be the hwpack, which is a platform specific collection of artifacts that are needed for the hardware initialization and support.
Debos is the main tool used for building Apertis images. Debos allows for modular design of images, and is capable of creating the modules and the images. The image modules used by Apertis are:
* hwpack: platform-specific artifacts related to hardware initialization and hardware support
* ospack: platform-independent artifacts common to a set of images such as target or development images
The apertis-image-recipes is the code repository that hosts the Debos recipes that are used for creating Apertis images. While the ospack recipes are explicitly named, the hwpacks are defined inside the apertis-image-*.yaml files. The rationale is that the hwpack is a set of steps and components that extends the ospack to boot on the target. Looking at the apertis-image-uboot.yaml recipe, we see that Debos uncompress the ospack to add changes on top of it, that it creates the image with partition scheme, filesystems, u-boot, and that it deploys the modified ospack into the image adding hwpack artifacts such as the kernel, and other system packages.
Apertis is both a platform and the automated infrastructure that is used to conveniently evolve and cheaply maintain the platform. The infrastructure uses automation to ensure quality and minimize maintenance costs. Some of the hwpack requirements and suggestions are in place to avoid deviation from the existing Apertis processes.