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Speaking of building immutable images - I want to do that for one of my projects, but scanning the docs for buildroot and yocto, I don’t see anything about applying updates - which is the part where I most want an off-the-shelf battle-tested solution so I won’t need to fly out and fix it in person.

Specifically, I want to have a disk image with two root partitions - by default (ie, what I flash to the SD card) the first partition has a read-only root FS and the second is empty. When an upgrade is ready, the system downloads the update from the internet, writes it to the second partition, and reboots - if the reboot is successful and the system passes health checks, it marks partition 2 as the default. If something goes wrong, it reboots again back into the original partition. (Then when v3 comes out, v2 downloads and writes it to the first partition, etc)

I keep thinking “surely this must be a solved problem?”, but I can find very little information about it; and the few things I can find are proprietary cloud-based management systems, when I’d much rather have my image hard-coded to poll an update-feed-URL that I control myself...



That is what Android is doing. You can read up on it here: https://source.android.com/devices/tech/ota/ab?hl=en




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