this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (13 children)

Concerning linux, yesterday I was watching this video on computerphile on the crowdstrike incident. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlaNMJeA1EA (*)

What is interesting is the comment made in the video on how chromebooks do software upgrades with dual "OS" disk-partitions and the ability to rollback to the previous OS-partition.

Question: is something like this also possible on one of the major linux distros? (debian, ubuntu, rocky, ...) What would be the procedure to do this kind of "dual partition" system-upgrade?

(*) a great video that explained some of the technical details in a very clear way, including some very interesting 'lessons learned' and "what if"s If you ever need to explain crowdstrike to your manager, this video is a good start.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

If I'm understanding the question right. This is what Immutable Linux distros do. Such as Nixos, fedora silver blue, and vanilla os.

I use nixos myself. But its quite different then most distros. The way you config it and install packages. For the better in my opinion.

Something like silverblue works pretty much the same as normal Fedora except you can't install packages like you normally would. Because the system files can't be edited. You mostly use flatpak for everything. Except the system updates. Which you have to reboot to switch to the new updated image. But past images are saved so you can rollback if needed.

From what I understand Chromebook os is a Immutable Linux distro same as the ones I mentioned. Just with Google with built in.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Yes, that was indeed the question.

If I read it correct, you need a specialised distro for this. You cannot do this on a off-the-shelf Debian or Ubuntu?

I'll do some searching on 'unmutable Linux'. Thanks for the (very quick) answer! 😀

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There is a file system you can use. A alternative to ext4. I think its Btrfs. I never tried it. But it let's you take snapshots that you can restore to. That's not just system files but everything. And pretty sure you can use it with a disto like arch and Debian. I think that's how snapshots work. But as I said I never actually tried it out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

just watched some videos on btrfs. Looks interesting indeed. I will look into it and perhaps do a test-installation and see how it goes.

Thanks for the info

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