Re: Advice

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2013-10-16 at 14:56 +0200, Alessio Igor Bogani wrote:

> 1) My environment involves a bunch of thin clients (pure text without
> any GUI) which are booted through network and have got the rootfs over
> nfs (using Poky the distribution generated by Yocto). Can OStree adapt
> to my case?

gnome-continuous has code to put bits generated via Yocto into OSTree:
https://github.com/cgwalters/poky/blob/gnomeostree-3.10-dylan/meta-gnomeos/classes/gnomeos-contents.bbclass

It's quite ugly.  And only partial since more code for this lives
inside the gnome-continuous git repo:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-continuous/tree/src/js/tasks/task-build.js#n1018

> 2) Is there a some sort of "Quick Start Guide"?

Not really; OSTree is at present more designed as a piece of
infrastructure to be used by build systems and for "simple" deployments
like gnome-continuous, rather than as a standalone entity.

What is the high level goal you want to achieve?  What's wrong with your
NFS booting?  Note OSTree is really designed for the clients that have
local storage.  You could use it merely as a hardlink-based deduplicator
on the server side, like:

/srv/repo  # OSTree repository
/srv/versions/1d3cc97d/{usr,etc}  # Checkout
/srv/versions/e74418c3/{usr,etc}  # Checkout

Then have a /srv/latest -> /srv/versions/e74418c3, and hack up your
initramfs to follow the link and boot from there.  That'd give you
atomic upgrades, which is possibly why you were investigating OSTree?