I me mine

Introduction A note of caution, most of this is an experiment and lacks finess. Ubuntu Core was released over half a year ago using this nice thing called snappy, the design allows for transactional updates among others, these updates keep on rolling though their streams and can be kicked out (rolled back) if something was fishy, guaranteeing a certain level of confidence that the system should not break. ...

This week, the snappy powered Ubuntu Core landed some interesting changes with regards to how it handles grub based systems. History The original implementation was based on traditional Ubuntu systems, where a bunch of files that any debian package could setup influenced the resulting grub.cfg that resulted after running update-grub. This produced a grub.cfg that was really hard to manage or debug, and what is most important, out of our control. ...

We want to use git, but where?

Image you get an update and the kernel panics with that update, what are you to do? Suppose now that you have a snappy based system, this is automatically solved for you. Here’s a short video showing this on a Beagle Bone Black, the concept is quite simple, if there is a panic, we revert to the last known state. In this video I inject an initrd that panics on boot after issuing a snappy update and before rebooting into the update. ...

The past few weeks in the snappy world have been a revolt, better said a rapid evolution for it to be closer to what we wanted it to be. Some things have change, if you are tracking the bleeding edge you will notice a couple of changes, the store for example now exposes packages depending on the OS release, and system images are now built against an OS release as well. ...

Today the always in motion ppa ppa:snappy-dev/tools has landed support for overriding the dtb provided by the platform in the device part with one provided by the oem snap. The package.yaml for the oem snap has been extended a bit to support this, an example follows for extending the am335x-boneblack platform. The path hardware/dtb key in the yaml holds a value which is the path to the dtb withing the package, so in this case, I put mydtb. ...