Firmware update

[Jerry Vonau]

On Wed, 2010-11-24 at 22:25 +0000, Daniel Drake wrote:
> On 24 November 2010 08:26, Jerry Vonau <jvonau at shaw.ca> wrote:
> > I've played around with the bootfw rpm, altering the install path to
> > reflect where /boot really is on the filesystem while booted up. This
> > has the advantage of being able to use rpm/yum to stage the upgrade of
> > the firmware. Providing you have the power cable connected, once OFW
> > looks in /boot it will look for bootfw.zip. I'm just putting the zip in
> > the correct location to be found. I have a test re-roll of q3a50
> > available from:
> > http://download.laptop.org.au/XO/F11/10.1.2/xoau-firmware
> 
> Unfortunately this isn't suitable for inclusion. At build time, the
> partitioned layout is not setup, and it is not even known if the
> resultant image will even be split into partitions. So this would
> cause the build to fail.
> 
> Additionally, part of the olpc-update design requires the entire
> crypto-signed filesystem to be available in one undivided place, so
> the RPM must continue installing to the "unpartitioned area" with the
> reliance that something else will handle partitioning later on.
> 
> This is all touched upon in /boot/README, and I'll document it more
> detail (on the wiki) at some point soon.
> 
> The kernel RPM also faces the same situation.
> 

Yes I know, I don't want this to included, it is meant to be an
alternative means to update firmware on a running XO, that is it.

> And, in general OLPC advises against using yum and RPM on XOs. With
> certain packages, doing this will override various tweaks put in place
> by the build system. Sometimes the side effects will be subtle, and
> other times they will be obvious.
> 

Not saying that there are not dangers, yum seems to work fine once you
get rid of the tmpfs on /var/cache/yum. The rpms that are released by
OLPC and included in the build are excluded from the Fedora repos right?
This excluding is carried forward to the repos, any %config files that
were changed would not be overwritten by rpm/yum, the new files would be
installed as .rpmnew. Which packages from Fedora, not counting locale
stuff, have tweeks?
 
> It would be possible (but messy) to make bootfw and kernel RPMs "do
> the right thing" when installed on live booted XOs, but it would be
> fragile, and doesn't change the fact that general usage of yum/rpm is
> likely to cause you problems at some point.
> 

Too much work at this point.

Jerry