The *dhcpcd.service* systemd unit file that ships with Buildroot is
broken. It orders the unit after *network.target*, which makes no
sense. It also configures the process to fork, but incorrectly
configures the PID file. Finally, by relying on the fork to indicate
that the network is "online," it does not distinguish between "an
interface is up" and "the network is reachable." As most daemons only
need the former, they only rely on *network.target*, and thus can fail
to start correctly.
To correct this brokenness, we provide our own unit file for
*dhcpcd.service*, based on the one included in the Fedora *dhcpcd* RPM
package. For "online" signalling, we provide a pair of shell scripts:
one reads from a named pipe waiting for a message and the other sends a
message to the pipe when configuration is complete.
The *vmutils* package can be built from source easily, as its just a
collection of Go applications. Grafana and Alertmanager are quite a bit
more complicated because of their respective browser applications. In
the interest of getting this project actually going, we'll just install
the official binary releases of these (for now?).
Ansible's `user` module *requires* that the `usermod` command be
present, even if it would not actually create or modify the specified
user. It does not actually execute it unless it needs to, so we can
stub it out. Making it a symlink to `false` ensures that it will never
do anything, and will fail if its actually run.
Victoria Metrics is not available by default with Buildroot, but adding
a package description for it is very straightforward. The flags and
tags are specified within Victoria Metrics's own Makefile.
The *systemd* package provides the `systemd-hwdb` command, which is used
during the build to generate `/usr/lib/udev/hwdb.bin` in the target
filesystem.
Raspberry Pi firmware files are now included in the root of the
distribution archive, insteaad of in an `rpi-firmware` subdirectory.
This will make it easier to extract them to the FAT32 partition on the
SD card, along with the kernel and initramfs images files.
