Alternative upgrade mechanism

[MrMoo]

Or subtitle:  How much memory?

At the moment the three embedded systems of m0n0wall, FreeNAS, and pfSense all use dd to perform full upgrades on HDD/CF images.  In pfSense I see the development of an binary patch update mechanism but unfortunately only allows updates and new files.  I went for an alternative of allowing upload of compressed ISO images, decompressing into MFS, and then using rsync with a quite a few options to the local root file system.  The ISO images I generate are significantly smaller as their is no configuration partition.

rsync \
	--verbose \
	--archive \
	--hard-links \
	--dry-run \
	--one-file-system \
	--delete-after \
	--delay-updates \
	--numeric-ids \
	--checksum \
	--omit-dir-times \
	--ignore-times \
	--exclude=etc/fstab

With suitable hosting it should be possible to use rsync+ssh as another alternative completely avoiding upload & decompressing the firmware image.

[sullrich]

See the RC2e thread.  I have scripts that do something similar now.

[MrMoo]

I'm actually having a lot of problems with the FreeBSD kernel panicing now, it worked fine on NFS root and there is plenty of memory available (256MB).  I can mount the image, rsync, but after unmounting the kernel panics and reboots.

:(

[sullrich]

Which version?  6.1-RELEASE?

[MrMoo]

RELENG_6 from CVS, I'm justing rebuilding with the latest now.  I used to use RELENG_6_1 but it broke so I went back to 6, the release tag is RELENG_6_1_RELEASE?

[sullrich]

Ahh okay, RELENG_6 should be stable.  There was a major NFS bug in 6.1 release however.

[MrMoo]

Nice, but on NFS its ok, I'll try a few different tag versions today and see what works.  Fixing this I can get another release out and work on the VLAN DHCP support.

[MrMoo]

Release is RELENG_6_1_0_RELEASE, trying that instead  :D

[MrMoo]

After some Gentoo inspired mistakes, I think I have pin pointed this bug (?) down to unmounting a second mount of the root device.  Is this a known strange problem?  ???

[sullrich]

Andrew fixed a few things in this area over the weekend.