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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 possible but inconvenient with an stock update-engine:

  1. The OTA update is very "heavy weight" -- it needs to update the boot and system file-system partitions (with a 200+MB file!) just to change a couple of files.

  2. Creating an update an OTA file for OSKR bots and modified development bots is possible, but it too difficult for most people.

  3. There is no way to blend changes from updates.

This enhancement changes the following to the update engine:

  • Making the signing check of the manifest, update files optional
  • Making the encryption of the OTA optional
  • Allows replacing individual partitions, esp just the system file system
  • Allows using a package manager or other tool to update the contents of the file system.

Some Design decisions

Using the tar utility is not used, and we found a small tool modify for out purposes instead. The busybox tar doesn't preserve permissions, which led to unexpected results and problems when updating executables.

Documentation

The update-engine looks the same to the rest of the system as before. (The OTA format, rules are described in the TRM...) It now accepts URLs with a .vpkg extension. If these are seen, the There is no at this time.

Cavaets

  • 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

The update

  • I believe that Wire has used an earlier modified version

References

  • The format and rules of the OTA files are in Chapter 32 of the Technical Reference Manual

  • A reference implementation of these changes is on github in a gist

Change history synopsis

Date Change
2020-8-30 Created
2020-12-6 Updated formatting, updated based on changes to 1.7.1, links to code style. Note: Changes in 1.7.1 made it possible to create -- especially encrypt and sign -- the files, a feature needed by the update-engine. Earlier versions of this proposal were mandated because of the inability to sign.