Mender – An open-source OTA software updater for embedded Linux devices
mender.io
mender.io
In case the Mender folks are here, have you looked into incorporating the concerns addressed bt The Update Framework (TUF) https://theupdateframework.github.io/
Yes, we have looked into it and the nice thing is that TUF seems to be quite easy to add as an additional security layer down the road.
One interesting challenge is downgrade attacks. How do you allow rollback of a bad deployment while disallowing an attacker to deploy an old and vulnerable version?
- rollback attacks -- impossible since all comms are secure, and there are no untrusted mirrors
- freezes -- impossible, because SSL channel must be re-negotiated every time
- mix and match attacks -- nothing to mix+match, mender only does one file (rootfs)
- helps secure mirrors -- mender does not support 3rd party mirrors, so no need to secure them.
You can see it right on the TUF homepage: it claims to replace application, library package and system package managers. This is a lot of work, which requires a lot of complexity, and there is no need at all to pay that price if you do not need to.
It is an easy solutions which ensures integrity and has few drawbacks for typical embedded systems.
The output of a typical Embedded Linux CI build is a complete RFS, having to care about individual packages would just be a headache, when you can replace the entire RFS and be done with it.
- Build system: Would need to figure out how to build all these packets (with their requirements) in a reliable way.
- Deployment: Deployments should be reproducable. All devices should get the same version of all subcomponents. And a rollback to an older version (with older versions of subcomponents) should be possible. Having some devices floating around with untested configurations (because the device decided to update on package but not the remaining ones) is not desirable, because you want to only handover fully tested/qualified software versions to the customer.
Building the whole RFS at once, storing it and flashing it at once currently seems like the way to go. Will take a look at mender if it could help.
Package systems are also quite fragile, ie if a post-trigger/script fails the package install fails. And sometimes not cleanly either, where the partially-installed package blocks install of a new fixed package. In the worst case the system is left in an in-between broken state.
I also am trying to get Resin.io like containers working. It seems like it would be an easier way to test and deploy.
We fiddled around also a little bit with the container route. I liked it for quick iteration times (rebuild a docker container, pull it from local image registry to device and test it there). But we found out that we won't get by with just container updates, and that most updates would also need to contain a new kernel or kernel module versions.
Like you, many teams are still doing local updates, or transitioning from local to OTA, at least for some products.
[0] https://docs.mender.io/1.0/Architecture/Overview#modes-of-op...
It is possible to make rollback fully automatic. In order to do so you need some integration with bootloader. It needs to be configured so that it can roll back to the previously working partition if update is broken. What is more, you can add some user space runtime checks that can verify the update and if those are not passing (updated image is broken) you can rollback to the previous one as well.
In my case, the first thing I do once an unverified version boots is to switch back to the other partition (so the known good version is active during the next boot), then run a detached reboot process that forces a reboot in 5 minutes. Once the system is up and it verified that everything is ok, it commits the next version (by switching back to the partition that booted and marking it as confirmed) so it is now active by default. Finally it kills the still running 'reboot' process.
As far as I understand your update process: You download a complete new version for every update and are able to stream that directly to the new partition? Is there any way to do delta updates? In my experience, most of the disk content is unchanged, unless you do major updates. In my case I download the new version using zsync, verify the downloaded/updated `install.zip` (which is kept on the volatile data partition), then extract that to the new partition. I make sure that `install.zip` is created in a way that it is rsyncable, so updates are pretty small that way. Of course you lose the streaming feature, unless you modify zsync somehow to support that.
The update is written to the inactive rootfs partition, uboot is configured to boot from it and the device is rebooted. Using the bootcount feature of uboot it is possible to roll back automatically if booting fails. Once the mender daemon comes up it will try to report the success of the deployment to the server. If this fails it will also roll back. Only after successfully reporting the success to the server Mender will "commit" the update, meaning configuring uboot to persistently boot from this updated partition.
Mender already does compression, but you are right that there are optimizations that can be made for application updates, e.g. delta or other types of updates. We are planning to implement this as well. The first priority for Mender is to make it robust, i.e. make sure the update is atomic and that you can always roll back.
I see. Thanks for the info. I suspected that u-boot does have support for that, but I wasn't sure.
> Once the mender daemon comes up it will try to report the success of the deployment to the server. If this fails it will also roll back.
Is there any deadline at all for that? I explicitly spawn a reboot command that ensures that even if everything gets stuck (in software, not in hardware) for whatever reason, the system falls back to the previous version (unless the reboot command gets killed too, in which case a manual restart is required). Any thoughts on that?
We have looked into hardware watchdog for this, but it is in the gray-zone of what an updater should be involved in. This is actually a more generic problem - maybe it hangs even when you did not deploy an update. There is varying support for hardware watchdogs across boards as well, unfortunately.
Most of the time it will not just hang, maybe it will crash or kernel panic and in those cases Mender will rollback. But the indefinite-hanging case is quite tricky and not yet handled.
Would be open to ideas here.
The first step of our boot process was to enable the watchdog. We extend the timeout periodically during the boot process, but generally if userspace isn't reached within 30 seconds or so we reset. Once in userspace, the daemon validates that things look good (this includes things beyond just application of the update -- did services start up correctly? Is the hardware operating as we expect?) before disabling the watchdog and marking the update as a success, at which point rollback isn't possible. At this point we might consider applying new updates, etc.
We also modified our first stage bootloader to be resilient to bootloader update issues, and chainloaded our second stage bootloader from a stub which could rollback.
We also niced the update process to avoid resource contention, allowed the updates to be delayed until the network was quiet, and paused them when it became noisy to make for a good user experience. There was a server-side flag to force updates to apply regardless, with higher priority, as well as one to basically disable all other functionality in the case of a unforeseen serious, perhaps security related, issue.
We actually had a discrete watchdog service which was responsible for petting an always-on watchdog, to rescue the system if it locked up or became unresponsive (if certain processes were not running, or responding, the watchdog would not be pet).
All of this led to effectively 0 failures in the field, a seamless user experience (except for the 30-second reboot when inactive). I wish everything I owned worked this way.
I could talk ad nauseum about this stuff. It's very cool to see the designs of others. I feel this is an under appreciated and under explored problem space.
I then proceeded to spend the next 2-3 hours reinstalling CentOS on my server, re-configuring oVirt and re-importing all of my VM's from the store.
Now, imagine an embedded device with a potentially flaky power source that could be interrupted in the middle of a system update - you really want to avoid that situation if at all possible. OSTree or Mender are a much better solution when you want an "all or nothing" upgrade, especially as they protect the system from FAILED updates and allow easy rollback.
You have "disk" and RAM limits. Your Android phone may have 8GB flash and 128Mb of RAM, but other devices might have less. And you can't (shouldn't) turn swap on
You also need a way of ensuring that if the update is b0rked you can recover in some (user friendly) way.
Edit: An upside of the alternating rootfs partition approach is that the rootfs can be cryptographically verified at the block level. Chromium OS implemented this, and CoreOS also uses that implementation. This is probably outside the scope of Mender itself, but the updating approach used by Mender enables it.
OSTree seems to rely on underlying filesystem to provide protection from power failures. This is, in my experience, is not a very reliable mechanism, especially when the SD cards are used. Thus, it is likely that if you have a device using OSTree updater and someone yanks the power cord at the bad time, your device may become unbootable.
We have been evaluating OSTree as a potential building block for Mender, however the key challenges we've come across:
integrating OSTree into an existing device/OS seems quite invasive - https://ostree.readthedocs.io/en/latest/manual/adapting-exis...
block level signatures is not possible, which we feel is a requirement for an over-the-air updater
rollback is not built-in and can be quite challenging to implement reliably (bootloader level)
Think OSTree as more of a building block, like Git is for your development process. We might use it in the future but robustness and easy integration are our first priorities.
For security-sensitive embedded devices (e.g. payment terminals), block level signatures would allow hardware verification during boot as well (1st stage bootloader verifies 2nd stage, then kernel, etc.) if designed correctly.
Yocto layer: https://github.com/advancedtelematic/meta-updater Quickstart project with a nice tutorial: https://github.com/advancedtelematic/garage-quickstart-rpi
And yes, we have chosen it because you don't have to waste twice as much disk space, and, more importantly (for wireless networks at least), you don't have to download the whole image.
Mender is basically full image update solution while resin is container based. Mender is fully open source, both client and server, resin is having only client open source. Mender is more lightweight, it provides a thin layer to be integrated with the already existing stack, while resin is providing full stack you need to use to be able to incorporate update mechanism.
Mender is also on a less restrictive software license
According to the article Mender releases under Apache 2.0, and all resin.io's open source code is also on Apache 2.0, so it should be the same permissive setup.
(Source: working at resin.io)
I guess an over-the-air (OTA) software updater for embedded Linux devices could be considered some kind of systems programming...