On Wed, 2022-08-31 at 12:25 -0400, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Wed, Aug 31, 2022, at 4:33 AM, Richard Brown wrote:
On Tue, 2022-08-30 at 21:01 +0200, Jacob Michalskie wrote:
So I would say yes, but I assume not everyone will be this enthused about changing the snapshots to not include /boot, since we already had a discussion about this a few years back, and I got a big fat nope last time around
If /boot is not included in snapshots, then users will not be able to use snapshots/rollback whenever there is an issue with the kernel, grub, initrd, and such that prevents the user booting
It is one method to pin vmlinuz+initramfs versions based on the installed kernels in any (system) snapshot. Btrfs snapshots aren't the only way to achieve this. The bigger issue is how to go about making $BOOT the correct size, because it's no longer part of the Btrfs pool. The size depends on the amount of rentention.
Pinning versions only works if its only the versions being changed that caused the problem. One of the reasons btrfs snapshots beats every other automatic healing mechanism is that they also capture unexpected behaviour, such as issues caused by rpm scripts. And our rpm packaging scripts are just as likely to cause problems as actual version bumps of binaries..if not more so, as those scripts are often, by design, doing intelligent stuff based on what they detect on the installing host..we sometimes NEED packages to behave differently depending on what else they find on the system, but in doing so we NEED a way to capture those differences and roll them back if they prove to be invalid. We have that now with snapshots/transactional-updates, and nothing else. Any new augmentation/replacement to the status quo needs to at least keep parity with what we already have.
I would strongly argue that would be a huge, detrimental, regression compared to the status quo
Were it to be dropped entirely, I agree. But the idea anyone needs weeks, let alone months, of system snapshots isn't very compelling. And also the farther back the rollback, the more security and bug fixes are rolled back too.
Someone who doesn't reboot their system for months, may need months of system snapshots. As a MicroOS fan, I might say that such long uptimes are stupid and best avoided, but I'm also well aware that such long uptimes are VERY common among our userbase, especially on the enterprise side of things. So, yeah, we need months of snapshots as long as their are months of potential boot-breaking changes which have not been validated by a boot. -- Richard Brown Linux Distribution Engineer - Future Technology Team SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman