piCore15.0 Beta

[ovacikar]

The 15 beta 1 comes with 80MB p1 partition. I have a second RPi with the output below.
What is wrong with the 80MB ? Increasing p1 unnecessarily leaves less space for the p2. Especially on a small card like 256 / 512 MB.

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Linux picore 6.6.28-piCore #4 Thu Apr 18 22:44:37 EDT 2024 armv6l GNU/Linux
Device       Boot StartCHS    EndCHS        StartLBA     EndLBA    Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1    128,0,1     1023,3,16         8192     172031     163840 80.0M  c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)

[Rich]

Hi Paul_123

... I don't want to release an image with only a 64MB partition, but what is the right number?

I guess that depends on how much stuff do you expect users
to be adding to the boot partition.

I have seen references to articles like this:
https://www.novaspirit.com/2018/01/09/tiny-core-raspberry-pi-zero-w-install/
where they recommend deleting an unneeded kernel architecture to make
room to download extensions needed for setting up wifi. They probably picked
that partition because its FAT32 so Windows can download the files if necessary.

In that article they download everything including .info, .tree, .list, and .zsync.
For TC9 ARMv6 that amounts to 5.8M.

So in my uninformed opinion, I would think 10M to 15M above the required
space for the boot files should be adequate.

[Paul_123]

The reason I went to 128MB is due to being able to run multiple kernel versions.  As well as leaving space for firmware upgrades on the pi4's. For those of us who do in place upgrades.   But I can put back to ~80MB

[Juanito]

‘sounds interesting, how do you do the firmware update on a piCore RPi4?

[patrikg]

You can also save some space by not start at sector 8192, I think you can start at 1.
Raspberry pi doesn't need and boot sector.

Something like this:

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LANG=C parted --script -a none sdimage.img unit s mktable msdos mkpart primary fat32 1 80Mb mkpart primary ext4 80Mb 100%

[Paul_123]

Well for sure the easiest way to upgrade the firmware is to just download the firmware recovery image using rpi imager, put it on an empty sd card, boot it, then swap back.   If you have never done it, you may need to update the USB controller too.

The repo with firmware is here:   https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom

Its a little tricky due to dependencies, and where it expects to find the boot drive mounted.  But environment variables can adjust that.

raspi-utils, pciutils and python3 are dependancies.

[Paul_123]

You can also save some space by not start at sector 8192, I think you can start at 1.
Raspberry pi doesn't need and boot sector.

This is done for compatibility of the card inserted into any number of operating systems.   We have experimented in the past, and have had problems.

1) The official SDCard formatter tool puts the partition on sector 8192
2) RaspiOS puts the first partition on sector 8192