update documentation for arm images builder

[mkaczanowski]

This is a proposal to replace the solo-io repo with a plugin that I wrote recently.

Why not contributing to solo-io plugin?

A few reasons:

• there is a lot of copy pastes in the repo with the intent of re-usability (ex. ISO module for handling base image). This creates some level of confusion and combined with another portion of copy-pastes over the codebase makes the code to be harder to understand than it really is.
• functionality limitations - it seems the plugin was written to support the model where a base image (".iso") exists and it's being reused. Also there are assumptions made to how the partition layout looks like (this varies a lot across boards etc)
• it seems the only system supported is ~ubuntu/debian for raspberry pi
• the documentation is there but it's unclear in some places (like how flasher is supposed to work etc)
• the code doesn't build with trunk (behind packer v4 iirc)

How is the mkaczanowski/packer-builder-arm better?

At first it tackles mentioned above issues. It's pretty extendable and works for variety of ARM boards with different OS'es etc.

So far I tested it with:

• raspberry pi
• parallella board
• odroid xu4 + odroid u3
• wandboard quad
• beaglebone black
• nvidia jetson

with ubuntu, rasbpian and archlinux. Each board has a bit different settings, like start sector or flashing process, so as you can see the flexibility is the key.

Request for doc update

Just to be clear, I think the solo-io plugins is pretty good, however I think because of the limitations and issues I mentioned above, it's reasonable to update documentation and let people know there is something imho better.

[hashicorp-cla]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[azr]

Hello @mkaczanowski and thanks for opening !

Would it be a good idea to leave the two on the page but sort of give a short description of their perks ? So that the user can pick the one that is the best for their use case ?

[mkaczanowski]

@azr sounds good to me. Let me update the commit

[mkaczanowski]

@azr updated commit with short description. Please let me know if you feel that is sufficient

[azr]

Hey @mkaczanowski, great ! I think we could update the first link so that there's not an empty link. other than that LGTM !

[azr]

LGTM, if @SwampDragons agrees I think we can merge this one 👍🙂. Thanks @mkaczanowski.

[SwampDragons]

Looks great to me. Thanks for adding your work to our documentation!

[ghost]

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