[OpenWrt-Devel] Atomic/failsafe upgrades?

Arthur Davis silpertan at gmail.com
Thu Jan 7 15:15:26 EST 2016


With failsafe upgrades, there always has to be "the thing that notices"
when something goes wrong. With a wholesale upgrade, OpenWrt can't be that
thing. The bootloader is probably the best candidate.

Also, I've worked on projects that used a separate supervisory processor
that was able to dictate the boot image. In one case, it was a very
powerful processor that had its own jobs in the system. In another case, it
was very small and just watched out for system health. One way to dictate
the boot image is to have the OpenWrt system ask via tftp, but there are
probably other possibilities depending on your system. (And this probably
doesn't really apply unless you are able to specify some fundamental bits
of the hardware.)

Lastly, there is OpenWrt's failsafe mode which doesn't solve all of your
concerns, but it should be noted:
    https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/generic.failsafe

Arthur


On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Eric Schultz <eschultz at prplfoundation.org>
wrote:

> Joshua,
>
> I've had some similar interest in this topic.  As far as I know, there
> isn't anything like this on OpenWrt. There might be some overlap with the
> discussion of automatic updates from last week as well.
>
> Eric
>
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 11:44 AM, Joshua Judson Rosen <jrosen at harvestai.com
> > wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to decide on a Linux-based OS to use in a project,
>> and one of the features that I want is failsafe upgrades--
>> such that failing to run an upgrade procedure to completion
>> should be non-catastrophic, and automatically recoverable; the
>> system should always be able to (re)boot into a state
>> where it can run normally, either in the upgraded state
>> or in the pre-upgrade state.
>>
>> One option that I've deal with is to keep two parallel
>> system installs, upgrade whichever one you're not currently using,
>> try to boot _that one_ after the upgrade finishes,
>> and fall back to the last-known-good install
>> if either the upgrade fails in the middle or the boot into
>> the preferred install fails. IIRC, there's something like this
>> available with Yocto; and, if I understand it correctly,
>> NixOS also does something similar in spirit to this
>> (though perhaps with a different granularity).
>>
>> Are there any provisions for doing something like that
>> with OpenWRT?
>>
>> --
>> "Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."
>> _______________________________________________
>> openwrt-devel mailing list
>> openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
>> https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Eric Schultz, Community Manager, prpl Foundation
> http://www.prplfoundation.org
> eschultz at prplfoundation.org
> cell: 920-539-0404
> skype: ericschultzwi
> @EricPrpl
>
> _______________________________________________
> openwrt-devel mailing list
> openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
> https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/attachments/20160107/2c2f1c10/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
openwrt-devel mailing list
openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel


More information about the openwrt-devel mailing list