How to create a multi partition SD disk image without root privileges?

Question

Is it possible to create a complete SD image in linux without having root privileges (that is, no loopback mount)? I\'m looking for a way to automate embedded system image creat

Answer 1

I had this problem and couldn't find a viable solution, so I wrote this utility that we've open-sourced here.

From the README:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=disk.image bs=1M count=4
4+0 records in
4+0 records out
4194304 bytes (4.2 MB, 4.0 MiB) copied, 0.00470867 s, 891 MB/s
$ parted --script disk.image \
    mktable msdos mkpart primary 2048s 100% set 1 boot on
$ mkdir mntdir
$ partfs -o dev=disk.image mntdir
$ mkfs.ext4 mntdir/p1
mke2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
Creating filesystem with 3072 1k blocks and 768 inodes

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (1024 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

$ fusermount -u mntdir