Size validator accepts lowercase m and g for partition size but genimage expects uppercase only

[marcelgsteiger]

If the partition size is suffixed by "m" or "g" (instead of uppercase "M" or "G") it still gets validated OK, but the generate_images step then fails with a message like

ERROR: Invalid size suffix 'm' in '256m'

Obviously genimage (I'm using V19) only accepts uppercase size suffixes for M and G.

My suggestion is either convert m and g to uppercase before passing the size parameter or only accept uppercase in the validator regex.

Regards
Marcel

[learmj]

Hi @marcelgsteiger
Thanks for the report. genimage does accept lowercase s (for sectors), though...
We have the capacity validator which is uppercase only but this is not currently used for any variables (and does not support percentages).
If we make the size validator strict about uppercase, we'd lose the ability for it to map to genimage sectors. How big a problem this would be, I don't know.
Why can't you use use uppercase in your config?

[marcelgsteiger]

Hi @learmj
Of course using the uppercase suffix that genimage accepts is no problem for me. After testing the example setup I just had replaced the percentage indication by 256m and then found that this does not work as expected. Then I entered the size in bytes with underscores (for 256 MiB 268_435_456) in order to verify that a fixed size really works. Only after having read the docs for genimage I became aware that the upper case suffix M works just fine. Perhaps it would help to make the example more beginner-friendly by using a fixed size like 256M for the boot partition and leaving the percent suffix only for the root partition.

I have seen a size validator that includes a regex having separate upper and lower case letters in its string - I thought that removing lowercase m and g within this regex could solve the problem. But of course I do not know if that validator is also intended to be used elsewhere.

[learmj]

There wasn't really ever intended to always be a 1-1 mapping of validator types to units understood by other tools, but of course it helps.

The boot and system partitions actually default to 100%, but their values are set by the image layouts which use them. They're currently percentages to account for variable fill size but it doesn't really matter - it's expected that a user of the tool will set them according to their own needs using their own config file rather than assuming the default configuration will suit their purposes exactly.

Back to the size type - it may be better to only support uppercase for sizes like K,M,G etc. I'm sure we could live without s being a supported suffix, but to maintain compatibility with genimage the type could be tweaked to only accept uppercase for some units and be a bit more relaxed about others.

Thanks for looking at the docs :-)