On Mon, Nov 21, 2022, at 3:52 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:

> In particular, two reasons why an upgrade might be interrupted were raised:
> power being cut and the system crashing. Bootupd (or any other daemon) cannot
> do much about crashes so this isn't a good motivation. For power, we have
> partial solutions: software-initited poweroffs or reboots should be delayed by
> systemd inhibitors. 

Oh yes, definitely an obvious omission from the current code. Filed 
https://github.com/coreos/bootupd/issues/403 - thanks!

> Bootupd+bootupctl creates a lot of interface for the admin
> (status, update, adopt-and-update, validate). This is additional stuff
> to learn.

Yeah, totally valid comment; though `adopt-and-update` is not something most 
admins will need to know.  I've been thinking lately that `rpm-ostree upgrade` 
should at least *also* display information when bootupd needs to be invoked 
too.  (And if we did that then combined with the "dnf image" bit then typing 
`dnf update` would show this too, which should help a lot.  Plus having clients 
like gnome-software also become aware of bootupd was part of the idea)

> It is also additional logic to implement: bootupd must understand
> EFI and boot partitions, mount points, what to do during upgrades, etc.
> I took a brief look at the code and it makes various assumptions about
> how the partitions are named (instead of using part-type uuids!),

Part of the rationale of for this is that in order to do redundant disk EFI, we 
can't use the discoverable UUIDs.  Or at least, it'd need to be queried per 
disk and not globally.

> Also, bootupd does up-calls into the package manager to query state.

No - at least, not in the way you're thinking.  bootupd has a separation 
between "image build phase" and the client side.  The package management query 
only happens during image builds (e.g. rpm-ostree compose image/tree today) 
which are normally server side.

> Information should flow from the package management system into lower-level
> components

Yes...though did you read https://github.com/coreos/bootupd/issues/50 and the 
sub-thread with Robbie on this?  If we want to support lifecycling bootloader 
updates separately from the RPM database, that inherently calls for having the 
"package manager" (or more generally, the OS updater, which may not actually 
"manage packages" at least by default) *not* invoke bootloader updates - at 
least by default.

To connect this with the previous comment - on the client side, bootupd has its 
own notion of "update payload" which is just a bit of JSON that today captures 
the NEVRA of the component RPMs (but could obviously support content not from 
RPM too).

To state this all another way, remember *today* with systems using MBR/BIOS and 
grub2, `dnf update` does *not* update the MBR and hence `rpm -q grub2` is 
misleading.  So we already have a situation in which the RPM database is not 
the same thing as the bootloader state.

> The raison d'être for bootupd seems to be updates of grub. I guess there isn't
> much that can be done in the short term: grub doesn't provide a way to do
> updates atomically, and we need to do those updates, and bootupd seems to be a
> reasonable interim solution to wrap them. But I hope this will stop being
> necessary, and either grub will provide such functionality and/or we'll use a
> different bootloader. In other words, I understand and won't block this 
> Change,
> but doesn't make me particularly happy. It seems that it's code that will be
> used for some time and then go away.

Thanks, I agree with all of this in general; though, there's going to be a 
really long tail on "go away", particularly when one tries to scope in actually 
switching bootloaders...
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