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. -- 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/a7e71161-0114-403b-b5e2-1895cc14b9ecn%40googlegroups.com.
