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Creating private board overlays

Introduction

In the main ChromiumOS Board Porting Guide, we covered how to create a new board overlay for a project. The goal there was to create a board that'd be published for anyone to build themselves. However, it is not uncommon for people to want to develop their boards in secret before launch, or to have a few pieces that never get publicly released. ChromiumOS provides a framework for that too, and this guide covers that.

Note that this guide is not standalone. You should be familiar with the aforementioned board porting guide as we will not duplicate topics that are in common.

Private (forever) Features

Some examples of things that won't be released (whether it be practical or political or legal):

Private & Public Boards

Private and public overlays do not work in isolation. This means that if you have both private and public board overlays, they will both be used. This allows you to have a public overlay that includes as many releasable pieces as possible (and produce a usable image) while having a private overlay with just the few additional private-only pieces.

Often times people will start by creating only a private board overlay (which is a perfectly valid setup), and then once things have been released, create a public board overlay. This is the recommended workflow and you should keep this in mind when writing the private overlay -- don't make things harder for the public release. The goal of this guide is to show how to create a private overlay that is geared towards being released later on.

Bare Framework

While public overlays live in src/overlays/overlay-$BOARD/, private overlays live in src/private-overlays/overlay-$BOARD-private/. The file structure is the same though.

src/private-overlays/overlay-$BOARD-private/

Even if you have a public overlay, you will need at least these files (even if there is no content in them like make.defaults):

overlay-$BOARD/
|-- metadata/
|   `-- layout.conf          # Copy of the public overlay version with updated repo-name
|-- profiles/
|   `-- base/
|       |-- make.defaults    # Private board customizations (USE/LINUX_FIRMWARE/etc...)
|       `-- parent           # Either same as the public overlay, or a link to it
`-- toolchain.conf           # Same as the public overlay

Most of these files are one or two lines. Let's go through them one at a time.

metadata/layout.conf

This will be the same as the public overlay, except you'll want to add a "-private" suffix to the "repo-name" field. Here's what the private overlay for the lumpy board uses:

$ cat metadata/layout.conf
masters = portage-stable chromiumos eclass-overlay
profile-formats = portage-2
repo-name = lumpy-private
thin-manifests = true
use-manifests = strict

profiles/base/make.defaults

Since this will be a super set of the public overlay's make.defaults, use this form:

# NOTE: Only put private-specific stuff in this file.  If your settings
# can be used publicly, then use overlays/overlay-$BOARD/profiles/base/make.defaults
# instead.  There is no need to duplicate information -- these files stack.
# Initial value just for style purposes.
USE=""
USE="${USE} private-specific-flags"
# These are settings that today live in the private overlay, but may be moved to the public.
USE="${USE} public-flags"

profiles/base/parent

If you have a public overlay already, then the preference would be to redirect to that. Here is how the private lumpy overlay does it:

$ cat profiles/base/parent
lumpy:base

You can still add private specific settings to the profile by adding files under profiles/base/.

If you don't have a public overlay, then this will have the same content as if you had a public overlay (see the public porting guide for more info).

toolchain.conf

For now, this should be the same as the public overlay. We plan on making this incremental too, but haven't yet done so.