Fore!

Safe upgrades coming to Fedora?

Wednesday Nov 25, 2009

Catching up on my reading, this item caught my eye:

[Phoronix] Fedora 13 May Support Btrfs System Rollbacks

Nice to see Fedora planning to add features we in OpenSolaris take for granted!  I'd certainly be more inclined to use Fedora for the occasional times I need Linux if this came in, as I've suffered in the past from RPM disasters.  It does look like they've got some design work to do yet on the file system organization, as for rollbacks like this it's critical to ensure that system software state, operational data such as logs and audit trails, and user state are separated.  Though this is something we haven't yet completed satisfactorily in OpenSolaris, either.  We mostly do well on user state since home directories are outside the boot environment section of a root pool, but separating the invariant parts of /var (logs, mail queues) out from the variant parts is a problem we still need to resolve.



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Posted at 02:13PM Nov 25, 2009 by dminer in OpenSolaris_Installation
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> separating the invariant parts of /var (logs,
> mail queues) out from the variant parts is a
> problem we still need to resolve.

yes, yes, please, please.

I've done this manually, with a few different permutations, on some hosts. You wind up with a bunch of different datasets for random bits of /var (pkg/download, various log dirs, etc), and it all gets a bit messy, and occasionally trips over funny issues.

Things that would help:
- reorganising the directory structure so there's a simple namespace separation that can map directly to zfs/mount hierarchy.
- a unionfs or similar overlay that would allow cherrypicking and collecting several scattered directories into a single dataset.

Posted by uep on November 25, 2009 at 07:07 PM EST #

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