Developers of the Raspberry Pi project have unveiled new tools called rpi-image-gen, intended to simplify the process of creating custom system images for Raspberry Pi devices. The tools offer several advantages, such as quick assembly using pre-built binary packages, utilizing libraries and applications identical to Raspberry Pi OS, allowing for customizable section layouts and filesystem encryption, and supporting the generation of lists of packages while checking for vulnerable versions of programs. The code for rpi-image-gen is written in Shell and is distributed under the BSD license.
RPI-Image-Gen marks a departure from previous utilities like pi-gen, which were primarily used for configuring Raspberry Pi OS distributions. With RPI-Image-Gen, systems are created using the concept of “collections,” which are sets of yaml files containing package lists and metadata that define the operations to be carried out. These collections are used to create a build profile. To generate Rootfs and images with different filesystems and section layouts, RPI-Image-Gen leverages utilities like bdebstrap, mmdebstrap, and genimage.
