Atomic firmware upgrade

[Andrea]

Hi all,

 

  has anyone ever tried to use an atomic firmware upgrade system like rauc or swupdate?

 

https://rauc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://sbabic.github.io/swupdate/swupdate.html

 

I am playing with rauc, in order to do that I have to customize the partitioning of the SD/eMMC:

  - root1 (4GB)

  - root2 (4GB)

  - data (8GB, or remaining space)

 

Can someone suggest how to customize partitioning in such way? I played around setting USE_HOOK_FOR_PARTITION=yes, and hooking the create_partition_table but had no luck.

Any hint?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Andrea

[SteeMan]

@Andrea what is it you are trying to accomplish?  The reason I ask is that given what i see from those systems there are some significant challenges in having a boot A and boot B.  The first being that u-boot lives outside of the partitions at a specific location on the device(SD/emmc/etc).  So you really only can have one uboot, so that will be an area that won't be possible to have something to fall back to if an update of uboot fails.

The second issue I see is that Armbian and the underlying Ubuntu/Debian push frequent software updates out via apt.  Their is no concept of firmware updates that are complete sets of updates, you get a few updates each week.  Which is good for security reasons as security updates are made available as soon as possible.  But for what I suspect you are trying to do, you will need to create a mechanism to periodically package all available apt updates into a firmware bundle to get installed into your other partition.

 

But I'm just guessing on what you are trying to accomplish.  So a better explanation of your goals might be helpful.

[Andrea]

@SteeMan this is supposed to be a remote and unattended system, so I would like to control the updates very carefully in order to avoid breaking anything using apt (it happens sometimes...).

 

I know this is quite a challenge, but frameworks like rauc and swupdate are purposely designed to guarantee atomically and safe system upgrades. I would disable apt unattended system upgrades, protect the rootfs using overlayroot and possibly use rauc to upgrade the systems using a full image.

 

I am also evaluating tools like systemd-repart that may repartition the storage (eMMC, or SD) live.

[going]

21 час назад, Andrea сказал:

Hi all,

 

  has anyone ever tried to use an atomic firmware upgrade system like rauc or swupdate?

 

https://rauc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://sbabic.github.io/swupdate/swupdate.html

 

I'm using atomic OS updates on my work computer right now. And this is what is provided to me by default by the openSUSE General Purpose Operating System.

 

4 часа назад, Andrea сказал:

I know this is quite a challenge, but frameworks like rauc and swupdate are purposely designed to guarantee atomically and safe system upgrades.

I'm asking myself a question.
And what does the Armbian OS have to do with it?

 

Armbian is a general purpose OS. It is not an embedded OS in the classical sense of the term.

Embedded OS, for example, is what you have built using buildroot or Yocto.

In this case, you may need these tools as rauc or swupdate.

 

5 часов назад, Andrea сказал:

this is supposed to be a remote and unattended system, so I would like to control the updates very carefully in order to avoid breaking anything using apt (it happens sometimes...).

Apt does not violate anything. They violate improperly assembled packages that it installs.
You will probably have to control this process yourself.
In other words, to assemble some packages yourself and before sending them to your own repository, test them in practice locally in your laboratory.

To use atomic updates of multiple packages, you can use the BTRFS snapshot mechanism, for example.

 

In any case, you need to look for help on specialized forums of system administrators.

 

With respect