Collabora working on A/B booting and RO file system for Linux

poVoq

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NSlBzUtXNI&t=23m30s

Seems like a system very similar to what UT currently does, but with the added benefit of A/B booting and maybe easier RW switching.

Might be interesting for Ubports to switch to this system (if not too different from the current one) as it might become a more standardized upstream component.

AppLee

@poVoq
A/B booting doubles the system size on the phone memory.
That is not really possible on older android phones where size is very limited.

And I think this is close to what is done right now.
IIRC the updates are downloaded and checked while the system is running.
Then the bootloader overwrites the system for the next boot.
But it is not possible to revert back to the previous version because it has been overwrote. But keeping the previous version requires too much space as I really mentioned.

UniSuperBox

Ah, I was wondering when someone would make something like this. Good thing it didn't end up being us.

I actually reserved enough space on the PinePhone to create a multi-boot scenario. There's an A partition and enough space for an equally sized B partition on every Ubuntu Touch PinePhone. Given that Ubuntu Touch is about half the size of all other PinePhone distributions out-of-the-box, no one seems to have taken umbridge.

I wonder what happened with OSTree that they felt they needed an A/B system instead? Seems like everyone was planning to go the OSTree route instead of reserving twice the space.

poVoq

True some phones might have space issue. But in the end we are talking about what? 400 Vs 800 mb or so? Most phones will be fine with that easily.

But anyways, could be optional, and A/B booting would definitely make RW hacking much easier as the video presenter also explains.

But my main though is that this has a high chance of being more standardized as a normal way of booting Linux (Since Collabora and Valve are working on it), so it might be worth considering for Ubports to get behind this effort and thus build on upstream components in the future.