I might not be the best to explain this; I'm sure others can explain it better.

As my basic understanding goes:

Most of the drivers, libraries that interface the hardware to the software 
level is in the Gonk layer : see 
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Gonk

Some of the configurations for gonk lies within the kernel as well ( boot.img )

Gecko is all software level and has APIs, the engine, etc.  see 
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Architecture .

The system.img that gets flashed with a fastboot flash contains the parts of 
the gonk, gecko and gaia ( if the gaia is installed to the system partition ).

There's an extract script that ends up extracting the gonk and recompiles those 
files with our code and creates a new boot.img, system.img
That's what the backup-<device> folder is and is the reason why you were able 
create the boot.img and system.img  It's the product of the extract script.  In 
some devices, like the nexus, the repo for that device is pulled from the 
source repo ( i.e. from Google's repo ) and that's why we don't need a 
backup-<device> folder for those devices.  We build based on the changes from 
that repo.

If you have an old backup-<device> folder and not from the latest oem build, if 
they make changes to fix gonk level bugs; you will not get those fixes.
i.e. there are bugs that we can't necessarily fix in the gecko/gaia.  
Generally, I try to help releng keep those backup-<device> folders up to date 
so we don't have to worry about this case for QA / pvtbuilds .

Regards,
Naoki

On May 21, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Stefan Arentz <[email protected]> wrote:

> I am obviously confusing gonk and gecko here. I see I can build and flash 
> both, so I'm a happy hacker :-)
> 
> S.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> I don't understand the 'we have to extract Gonk from the device' part.
>> 
>> Why can't I build and flash the whole thing (gonk & gaia)? Like I've been
>> doing with the Unagi.
>> 
>> Is this about binary blobs again? Our build scripts extract those as part of
>> the build, no?
>> 
>> Sorry if I sound like a noob but I have not looked at any of this in a while
>> :-/

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