Simple solution to create a non-root partition image?

Greetings,

For an ongoing project with a read-only root filesystem, I'd like to 
create an image for a non-root partition.

To give you some context, this partition would contain data and scripts 
to be used at first boot to do per device provisioning work. Some of 
these would be removed after provisioning, as they could tip attackers 
about how secrets are stored if they get their hands on devices that 
haven't been provisioned yet. Hence, these cannot be in the read-only 
root filesystem.

To create such an image, I tried to create a new image recipe inheriting 
the "image" class, and then install some packages into the image with a 
"local" IMAGE_INSTALL list.

This seems it could work, but I'm struggling with removing dependencies 
(bootloader, kernel, etc) that are only relevant for a root filesystem 
image.

Would there be a simpler way to create a non root partition image?

Thanks in advance
Cheers
Michael.


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