Toradex Easy Installer - create more than 4 partitions

Hello,
in our current project we want to create 5 partitions on the eMMC and we would like to create them in the Easy Installer.
But if I define more than 4 partitions, I get an error message “…supports up to 4 partitions…”

Is it possible to create a GUID Partition Table (GPT) with the Easy Installer?
If not, can I create extended / logical MBR partitions?

Or do you have another nice idea which can easily be used for production?

OK, I tried to create partitions in another way:
I created a prepare_script which creates the eMMC partitions and fills them with data (rootfs, backup rootfs,…).
In the image.json just the boot loader installation (SPL, U-Boot) is defined.

My script is started - and after 30 seconds the installer continues with the installation of boot loader and starts wrapup.sh - while my prepare.sh is still running.
This message appears in tezi.log:
QProcess: Destroyed while process is still running.

There is no error message, but the preparation of my file systems was not finished.

I think, this is a bug in the Easy Installer.

I’m still open for answers to my question.

We use Qt’s waitForFinished which defaults to 30 seconds. Unfortunately Tezi does not check whether it really finished (there is a return value check missing), hence it will just continue alongside the script… I will create a ticket for that bug.

However, wrapup/prepare scripts are more meant for smaller migration type tasks, and we would rather prefer to not have a too long timeout, since if something does go wrong, people likely got impatient and would just turn off the system. To support use-cases as this we would have to make the timeout configureable.

With the MBR/DOS partition table format Toradex Easy Installer supports only primary partition, hence up to 4 partitions…

We are in the process of creating Tezi images for our Andorid BSP’s, which use GPT too. We already started to work on GPT support (see #29412). It is planned to officially release this feature with 1.4, where we also increment the config_format version number to 2. This allows older Toradex Easy Installer to detect images which require GPT support (instead of just failing due to invalid JSON property values).

However, in order to test the feature Toradex Easy Installer 1.3 is already capable of creating GPT. We anticipate to release 1.4 with GPT support as we have it currently. Hence, you can test GPT support already now by using the 1.3 release. To instruct the Toradex Easy Installer to use GPT set the property table_type to gpt in the block device dictionary e.g.

"blockdevs": [
    {
        "name": "mmcblk0",
        "table_type": "gpt",
        "partitions": [
            {
            ...

The Partition Type GUID can be specified using the partition_type property. If a file system is specified in the content of the partition, Toradex Easy Installer will automatically choose an appropriate Partition Type GUID according to the table in the Wikipedia Article about GUID Partition Table.

I was hoping, there is an undocumented option like this.
Thank you!

Is GPT support already implemented? For #29412) the status shows that it not submitted for mainline.

Hi @Anton!

From the table, the issue #29412 has the New Feature status, which means that it was indeed added to Toradex Easy Installer and is available for use (since 3rd April 2018, from release 1.4 on).

You can

The Submitted for Mainline column only shows if the addition was submitted to the Mainline of the Linux Kernel, which is commonly not the case for Toradex Easy Installer, as you can see in other of its issues.

Best regards,