In addition to mtools, I wrote a tool to package a set of files into a
fresh VFAT image - kinda like tar, but fat32 as output format. I'm using
it in my hobby OS project. It's a single C file but seems to work great,
albeit only tested in my workflow so far. Called it `fatcreate`, it's
available on my Gitlab [1] or on GitHub[2].

Best, Mara
[1] https://praios.lf-net.org/littlefox/lf-os_amd64/-/blob/main/util/fatcreate.c
[2] https://github.com/LittleFox94/lf-os_amd64/blob/main/util/fatcreate.c


Am Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 05:06:50PM -0500 schrieb Brian J. Johnson:
>Qemu's virtual VFAT (vvfat) disk type is a convenient way to test UEFI 
>applications.  It presents a folder on the host as a VFAT file system 
>to the guest.  It's not the fastest or the most stable disk type (be 
>careful not to modify files from the host while the guest is running), 
>but it's really handy.
>
>Another way to put a file on a UEFI VFAT disk image for qemu is to use 
>mtools (https://www.gnu.org/software/mtools/), a set of user-mode 
>programs which can manipulate FAT disk images.  You can write some 
>scripts around them to automate your workflow, similarly to uefi-run. 
>I've done that quite a bit in the past.
>
>Good luck,
>Brian J. Johnson
>
>-------- Original Message --------
>From: Ayush Singh [mailto:ayushdevel1325@gmail.com]
>Sent: Friday, June 3, 2022, 11:49 AM
>To: edk2-devel-groups-io <devel@edk2.groups.io>
>Subject: [edk2-devel] Running and Testing Modules and Applications
>
>Hello everyone, I wanted to ask everyone how most modules and
>applications are run/tested in edk2. I will be working on Adding Rust
>support for edk2 during GSoC and thus will probably have to do a lot
>of primitive testing. I did look at the EmulationPkg but didn't really
>understand how to use it. It simply drops me into gdb, although maybe
>that's what it is supposed to do?
>
>There were also some GUI programs (VisualUefi) that can be used in
>windows, but since I am in Linux, they aren't much useful. I also
>found a tutorial to run it in a physical machine
>(https://tait.tech/2021/04/18/uefi-development-environment/ ), but 
>that
>seems more for the final testing rather than testing during
>development.
>
>I have also tried using qemu for running applications, and I guess I
>was somewhat successful by using the script:
>`https://github.com/Richard-W/uefi-run` to test out uefi applications
>in qemu. However, it builds a FAT filesystem around the EFI
>application, so I was wondering if there was a better and simpler way
>to do it.
>
>Ayush Singh
>
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