Hacker News Reader

Comment by _e | Hacker News Reader

Does remarkable use a fork of ChromiumOS? ChromiumOS uses the BOOT-A and BOOT-B partitions for upgrades and it reverts to the previously used boot partition if the OS fails to successfully boot[0].

[0] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...

View on HN

No, it uses Yocto/OpenEmbedded.

Thank you for the fast response and, also, for putting this onto my radar. For anyone else who is curious, Yocto/OpenEmbedded is used to create custom linux distributions for embedded devices:

https://www.yoctoproject.org/members/openembedded/

https://www.yoctoproject.org/software-overview/

using two partitions in this way on embedded devices has been a trope for a very long time. service/warranty calls are expensive!

usually there are three. system a and system b which are updated and flipped and some sort of emergency recovery that either has a factory image or a very light rom that phones home for a new image.

It sounds like Blue/Green deployments.

For the curious... An overview of the Blue/Green deployment model:

https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/devops/what-is-blue-green-d...

sorta. but i think that blue/green deployments are typically monitored by some central control that will halt and reverse a whole fleet deployment, where typically embedded devices run that state machine locally. (after flashing the unused partition, if it fails to boot, fail back to the old one and disable the update).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com