On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 4:19 PM John Allwine <j...@pocketnc.com> wrote: > > I'd like to start a discussion about creating complete Beaglebone images that > leverage OSTree to be able to atomically update the system as a whole. The > scripts in https://github.com/beagleboard/image-builder generate complete > images for the Beaglebone that include specific kernel, apt packages, boot > settings, git repositories, etc. Updating a deployed Beaglebone without > reflashing a new image involves piecemeal updating of those various > components. Improperly updating can leave the system in a broken state and > can be difficult to get back into a good state. It would be great to be able > to leverage those image-builder scripts to construct the rootfs, add that > tree as a commit to an OSTree repository and properly configured Beaglebones > could download that commit and atomically switch to it to update the whole > system while preserving portions of the system such as home directories and > other key directories (/etc, /var?). If something did break, rolling back is > easy as well. > > Configuring a Beaglebone this way would make most of the system read-only so > using apt-get to install new packages wouldn't work without altering its > implementation, but that seems like a worthy trade off. This would be for > someone who has a Beaglebone with an out-of-the-box image and some > scripts/servers set up in their home directory who doesn't want to worry too > much about the system as a whole, but wants to be able to easily update it > without reflashing or doing piecemeal updates. People who develop software > for Beaglebones in their customers' devices could host their own OSTree > repository and make their own modifications to the image-builder scripts if > they have their own set of system dependencies (this is what I'd like to do). > > Does anyone else think this would be useful? Is there anyone with the > expertise to know what details would need to be taken into account to make > this work properly? > > OSTree documentation is here: https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/ > It lists a number of examples of it being used in various Linux distributions.
I remember seeing one of Peter Robinson's demo of Fedora IoT a few years back at ELC, that used OSTree+btrfs. It worked pretty well. At that time, I made sure btrfs worked well for us, to possibly look down that road. My biggest issue, the 4gb eMMC, was too limited for the out of box images to do something like that. For an iot/console image the idea would still work well.. While working on bullseye images this week, i noticed we still have the "--no-merged-usr" flag for debootstrap, we should try with that removed in 'bullseye', as ostree needs that.. We did have ostree installed on the lxqt images: https://github.com/beagleboard/image-builder/blob/master/configs/bb.org-debian-buster-lxqt-v5.4.conf#L138 --no-merged-usr (due to bugs in stretch/buster..) https://github.com/beagleboard/image-builder/blob/master/scripts/debootstrap.sh#L138 Regards, -- Robert Nelson https://rcn-ee.com/ -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beagleboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beagleboard/CAOCHtYgHJiESN2df7jVbUErSwL5mcoPva-woQXR91t%3D0nCJJDQ%40mail.gmail.com.
