Implementing Power-Safe Atomic Over the Air Updates - Drew Moseley, Toradex
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2022-12-14

Implementing Power-Safe Atomic Over the Air Updates - Drew Moseley, Toradex

The idea of over-the-air (OTA) updates has been around for a long time but only in the last few years has it been a subject of focus within the connected device development community. There are numerous open-source, commercial and DIY solutions. We’ll start with an overview of the more popular architectures for supporting OTA in embedded Linux devices. While we will focus on Linux, the architectures are more broadly applicable. The number one requirement for any OTA system, implemented at scale, is to be resilient in the face of unpredictable power cycles. Drew will discuss how the OSTree system ensures atomicity and power safety when updating the contents of a root filesystem. He will provide examples showing how the system behaves when power cycles occur He’ll also discuss how OSTree can help avoid retransmitting data. Drew will then examine how the OSTree infrastructure is used as part of the Toradex Torizon platform implementing a full end-to-end OTA system for connected Linux devices. The target audience for this talk is system designers considering OTA requirements to help them understand the complexities involved in a robust, atomic over-the-air update. This talk has been given previously but not in an open session with publicly available recordings.