As traditional package management solutions like APT and Yum gradually become obsolete and are unsuitable for the numerous emerging fields of Linux, such as embedded systems and IoT, a new generation of atomic Linux software upgrade solutions has emerged. Matt Porter from Konsulko Group compared these new technologies at the 2016 European Embedded Linux Summit (held from October 11-13, 2016, in Berlin, Germany).
Several Linux vendors are now using incremental atomic updates to deliver more reliable distribution updates, achieving smaller update sizes through binary diffs and providing rollback in case of unexpected situations. These new distribution upgrade mechanisms include SWUpdate, Mender, OSTree, and swupd. Interestingly, Ubuntu’s Snappy was not mentioned in the slides.
SWUpdate is a modular upgrade framework that supports single/double images, image signing, can be configured using Kconfig, and can handle both local and remote upgrades. SWUpdate is specifically designed for embedded systems.
Mender is an upgrade solution that utilizes wireless transmission for upgrades. It is a dual-image upgrade framework written in the Go programming language.
OSTree is the most well-known among the incremental atomic upgrade solutions demonstrated; it is similar to Git. It is present in both Fedora and RedHat, and even the Gnome Flatpak container system uses OSTree.
Swupd is the last upgrade system presented, initially used by Intel’s Clear Linux distribution. Its code is hosted on GitHub, with its client and server managed by Clear Linux. Swupd is similar to OSTree but allows updates to be enabled without requiring a reboot.
For those topics not covered at the European Embedded Linux Summit in Berlin, you can visit these PDF presentations to learn about these software update mechanisms focused on embedded Linux.
via: http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ELC2016-Software-Updates
Author: Michael Larabel Translator: GHLandy Proofreader: wxy
This article is a translation by LCTT, proudly presented by Linux China
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[1]: https://github.com/sbabic/swupdate[2]: https://github.com/mendersoftware/mender[3]: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree[4]: https://github.com/clearlinux/swupd-client[5]: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/Comparison%20of%20Linux%20Software%20Update%20Technologies.pdf[6]: http://www.michaellarabel.com/[7]: https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject