[Buildroot] manipulating raw disk images as non-root user

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Dallas Clement,

On Sat, 2 Aug 2014 11:45:58 -0500, Dallas Clement wrote:

> I am trying to figure out a way to produce a uSD card image file during my
> build process and do it as a non-root user.  I am hoping to do this from a
> post image script.
> 
> I can create the image file with dd and partition it with parted as a
> non-root user.  However, I have not figured out how to format, and populate
> the image file.  Tools such as kpartx and losetup seem ideal for this
> purpose except that they must be run as root.
> 
> Does anyone know of a way to do this using qemu or fuse or related tools?

You could have a look at genimage that is available as a package in
Buildroot. Yann E. Morin also had developed some patches for Buildroot
to make that possible, but they were not merged due, I believe, to a
too high complexity. I'm sure he will be available to give you pointers
to these patches.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com