VEP1 - Update-engine changes
Summary: Update-engine changes to make for unsigned, incremental updates; and to reduce the number of partitions modified.
Authors: Randall Maas
Description of the changes¶
Motivation: Building a new, experimental development release is not possible with an stock update-engine:
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We can't create an OTA file for unmodified production, development and OSKR bots, as it needs to be signed in order for the update-engine to apply it.
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The OTA update is very "heavy weight" -- it needs to update the boot and system files systems (with a 200+MB file!) just to change a couple of files.
This enhancement changes the following to the update engine:
- remove signing check of the manifest, update files
- Allows replacing individual partitions, esp just the system file system; usually it replaces several at a time
- Allows using tar to update the contents of the system file system
- This is not recommended since it doesn't get the permissions right
Documentation¶
- none at this time
Cavaets¶
- the tar based updating of the system file system doesn't always work as expected, since the busybox tar doesn't preserve permissions
- it is tricky to create a tar file
- there is no undo for a partial update
- this probably doesn't disable delta updates properly, so if a delta update were to be issued, we'd need a way to make sure it doesn't mess up the FS.
Status¶
- it works well (except the system fs file-only changes), I believe that Wire has used this or a modified version
- I am considering other changes to support package-based updates to the file system, to better address the above issues.