From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2015 22:26:02 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] Buildroot enhancement proposal: on starting a GUI service at boot In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20150715222602.67784238@free-electrons.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Angelo, On Wed, 15 Jul 2015 17:21:13 +0200, Angelo Compagnucci wrote: > One of the common use-case for an embedded system is to start a gui at > boot. Probably it will be the main point of interaction after all and > the most sensitive process in the whole system. > > I'm thinking on adding a custom option to set correctly a gui service > to be started at boot, something that will make easier for a buildroot > user to start a custom gui service at boot instead of fighting with > overlay and service scipts/files. > > Note that this gui service is different from a standard service: it > should be respawned if someting goes wrong and this cannot be done in > a normal busybox/systemv init script: for busybox/systemv it should be > added directly to /etc/inittab. > > Actually I'm more oriented in adding an option into "System > configuration": a string that will contain the command line to be > added as a service. The matter is to individuate which init system is > in use and acting accordingly: adding a line in /etc/inittab for > busybox and systemv or adding a service file for systemd. > > Aside from technical difficulty which is none, what could be the best > way to implement such behaviour? Is it a desirable feature for > buildroot? > If yes, what is the best approach to have it accepted, a "package", an > option, where? I don't really understand what would be the usefulness of such a thing. The mechanism to start a "GUI service" highly depends on which graphical library you're using. Starting a Qt on framebuffer application will be very different from starting an application under X.org. To me, this is exactly the sort of things that is so system-specific that it belongs to a project-specific rootfs overlay. You're saying "fighting with overlay and service scripts/files", but I don't really see where a "fight" is needed. A rootfs overlay is dead simple to us, and if a Buildroot user is not capable of using a rootfs overlay, he will probably not be capable of doing lots of other tasks/tweaks needed to get his embedded Linux system running correctly. Best regards, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering http://free-electrons.com