Adapting an existing distribution to OSTree

[Leon Anavi <leon anavi konsulko com>]

Hi,

I am a working on the integration of OSTree with GENIVI SOTA project in 
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL).

GENIVI SOTA is an open source project for providing a complete suite for 
uploading, managing, queueing, transmitting, validating, and deploying 
software updates remotely to a fleet of vehicles. There is a server in 
the cloud and clients for the embedded devices. The client downloads the 
binaries from the server, and then hands them over to the system for 
installation. After reviewing several open source solutions for 
installation strategies during the AGL face to face meeting in May the 
interested parties decided to try OSTree. More technical details about 
the discussions are available in AGL wiki and mailing list:
https://wiki.automotivelinux.org/agl-distro/may2016-f2f
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/automotive-discussions/2016-May/002077.html

AGL is Yocto/OE based distribution. I have already integrated RVI SOTA 
client which is written in the Rust programming language to the upstream 
of AGL. I have also created Yocto/OE recipes for building up to date 
version of OSTree and its dependencies. At the moment my patches for 
adding OSTree to layer meta-agl are pending for a review:
https://gerrit.automotivelinux.org/gerrit/#/c/5813/3

Ideally, I am looking for an end to end solution for using SOTA download 
mechanism in conjunction with static-deltas, atomic updates and 
rollbacks from OSTree.

Now I am trying to adapt AGL as an OSTree-enabled system and to generate 
OSTree commits from the Yocto builds. I have already read chapter 
"Adapting existing mainstream distributions" from the official 
documentation, I tried out GNOME continuous in a virtual machine and I 
looked for hints from the bash scripts in directory tests. I still need 
more information.

Could you please provide me more practical guidelines and examples for 
converting an image built with bitbake to OSTree based image?

Best regards, Leon

--
Leon Anavi
Software Engineer
konsulko.com