On Fri, 29 Nov 2013 17:07:18 +0200 Aliaksei Katovich <[email protected]>
said:

> hi all;
> 
>       I would like to bring to your attention Tizen system rollback feature.
>       The idea is to provide possibility to roll back Tizen based system to
>       one of several known working configurations. Most obvious use-cases
> are:
> 
>       * system update or upgrade failed;
>       * there are regressions introduced by system update;
>       * User does not like features added by system update;
>       * User wants to restore device to first time configuration;
>       * User wants to restore device to factory defaults.
> 
>       Proposed architecture is based on device-mapper thin-provisioning
>       capabilities. Please find more details in attached document.
> 
>       Before starting actual implementation of this feature I would like to
>       hear your opinion about presented architecture and the idea in
> general.
> 
> Thanks,
> Aliaksei

for updates rendering things unbootable (kernel or low level system) what if an
update renders the os unable to even boot? kernel doesn't even work? shouldn't
we have a secondary rescue-os install with a "never updated kernel + miniature
userspace", which is only JUST big enough to boot, prompt the user that
something "bad" happened, maybe ask if they which to go back to stable, factory
or initial, then do the rollback, reboot and continue booting normally?

this would require the real OS to somehow indicate it has booted successfully
in a way that stays around in memory - eg some fixed memory region to store a
signature with a counter. bootloader needs to know about this memory region and
check signature on reboot as well as init the memory to some default known
state. if the boot fails to set this memory to "all ok" any re-boot through the
bootloader would switch to booting the rescue os.

this would allow the same rollback mechanism to be used everywhere with only
some minimal support from the bootloader (to know when to automatically switch
to the rescue os).

btrfs also comes with performance characteristics that may or may not be
desirable. there is also tux3 i think that does snapshots (and thus rollbacks).

devicemapper seems at a first glance the best option as it works below the fs
level thus keeping the choice of fs still open, but it may have performance
affects that could range from minimal to severe.


-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <[email protected]>
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