5.8. Creating Partitioned Images

Creating an image for a particular hardware target using the OpenEmbedded build system does not necessarily mean you can boot that image as is on your device. Physical devices accept and boot images in various ways depending on the specifics of the device. Usually, information about the hardware can tell you what image format the device requires. Should your device require multiple partitions on an SD card, flash, or an HDD, you can use the OpenEmbedded Image Creator, wic, to create the properly partitioned image.

The wic command generates partitioned images from existing OpenEmbedded build artifacts. Image generation is driven by partitioning commands contained in an Openembedded kickstart file (.wks) specified either directly on the command line or as one of a selection of canned .wks files as shown with the wic list images command in the "Using an Existing Kickstart File" section. When applied to a given set of build artifacts, the result is an image or set of images that can be directly written onto media and used on a particular system.

The wic command and the infrastructure it is based on is by definition incomplete. Its purpose is to allow the generation of customized images, and as such was designed to be completely extensible through a plug-in interface. See the "Plug-ins" section for information on these plug-ins.

This section provides some background information on wic, describes what you need to have in place to run the tool, provides instruction on how to use wic, and provides several examples.