Sorry for the delay in response on this. My laptop died and spent a couple days rebuilding it and catching up on work before going on vacation...

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 10:31 AM Michael Olbrich <m.olbrich@pengutronix.de> wrote:
> I'd still like to know a bit more about your use-case. I know very little
> about what other people out there are doing with PTXdist, so it's sometimes
> hard to decide if I can rip out some old stuff of if it's still needed.
>
> It it a initramfs only setup, or is there a normal rootfs as well? In the
> later case, how do you create the initramfs? Which packages are part of
> initramfs?

We have separate ptxdist projects that build the real rootfs vs the linux kernel image with an embedded initramfs image.
The initramfs content is simply whatever packages are selected and whatever they install via the targetinstall for each package.
Our initramfs has 3 purposes:

1. Emergency recovery console (mainly used as a means to break out of a reboot loop encountered during development)
For this we have busybox, ash and a few other tools

2. As a means of performing firmware updates.
I use the initramfs-tools to provide the init script and use the script hooks it provides to check if a firmware update is needed before the real rootfs is mounted.
 
3. Mounting the real rootfs

-Jon