Feature Suggestion: "config.txt"-based control for inc/exclusion of /boot/firmware files

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
raspberry-pi, shell
Domain
build-system, operating-systems

Research direction

Start by tracing how the current build populates /boot/firmware and where a supplied config.txt could be read. Compare the requested device-tree, kernel, overlay, and firmware-file selections against the existing image-building flow; done means the configuration reliably produces the intended smaller image.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Can I suggest a feature for achieving even-smaller resultant images, by allowing a user to supply a "config.txt" file, which could be read to manipulate the inclusion/exclusion of files that normally end up in /boot/firmware? For example, lets say a user has this in their config.txt file...
...against this text string (for example, destined for a headless Compute Module 4 with on-board storage, but no WiFi/Bluetooth module)...

#arch=v8+
#model=bcm2711-rpi-cm4
disable_overscan=1
disable_splash=1
dtoverlay=disable-bt
dtoverlay=disable-wifi
dtoverlay=i2c-fan,emc2301,i2c_csi_dsi
dtparam=watchdog=on
gpu_mem=16

This could instruct to add the bcm2711-rpi-cm4.dtb device tree base, the latest Pi arm64 v8+ kernel8.img, and, through via a match-all regex expression with the multi-line flag...

^dtoverlay=(.+?)[,\n$]

...to include the disable-bt, disable-wifi and i2c-fan device tree overlays. Another possibility is, by searching for gpu_mem=16, to determine whether or not to use the smaller fixup4cd.dat and start4cd.elf firmware files over the full size fixup4.dat and start.elf ones (subject to if the intended Pi board/CPU model uses them).

Dominant language
Shell
Stars
129
Forks
16
Avg merge
2d 14h
Merged PRs (30d)
3

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