Wic is a command line tool that can be also seen as an extension of the BitBake build system. It was developed due to the need of having a partitioning mechanism and a description language. As it can be concluded easily, BitBake lacks in these areas and although initiatives were taken to make sure that such a functionality would be available inside the BitBake build system, this was only possible to an extent; for more complex tasks, Wic can be an alternative solution.

In the following lines, I will try to describe the problem associated with BitBake's lack of functionality and how Wic can solve this problem in an easy manner. I will also show you how this tool was born and what source of inspiration source was.

When an image is being built using BitBake, the work is done inside an image recipe that inherits image.bbclass for a description of its functionality. Inside this class, the do_rootfs() task is the one that the OS responsible for the creation of the root filesystem directory that...