[PATCH v3 0/2] bootstd: New bootmeth for RAUC A/B systems

[Tom Rini]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2025 at 07:46:54PM +0200, neil.armstrong at linaro.org wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 04/06/2025 14:15, Martin Schwan wrote:
> > This series implements a new bootmeth for RAUC A/B systems. RAUC (Robust
> > Auto Update Controller) is a lightweight update client, providing "Safe
> > and Secure OTA Updates for Embedded Linux". See the following links for
> > more information about RAUC:
> > 
> >    https://rauc.io/
> >    https://rauc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
> > 
> > PHYTEC uses RAUC in its Yocto based distribution "Ampliphy" as the
> > default way of updating embedded devices based on PHYTEC hardware. So
> > far, the logic selecting the correct partitions and files to boot was
> > being implemented in the U-Boot environment. While this is a
> > straightforward way to do it, adding and supporting new platforms became
> > somewhat tedious and is platform-specific. The introduction of U-Boot's
> > "Standard Boot" provided a convincing alternative, promising a simpler
> > and more portable way of booting, even for RAUC systems. This led me to
> > implement a new bootmeth supporting RAUC A/B systems. Note, that this
> > new bootmeth is not proprietary to PHYTEC products and is designed to
> > work on other hardware with a RAUC A/B system, too.
> > 
> > The bootmeth currently only supports symmetric A/B partitioning layouts.
> > E.g. A/rescue is not (yet) supported. The partition indexes and default
> > slot tries can be specified via configuration options.
> > 
> > For now, the bootmeth_rauc uses a similar approach for loading the
> > Kernel and device tree as the bootmeth_script, in that it requires a FIT
> > containing a U-Boot script loading the desired distro. It could be
> > possible to support booting without a script and load the Kernel and DT
> > directly with this bootmeth, but I found the script method to be very
> > flexible for now, in letting the distro decide what to load.
> > 
> > The bootmeth_rauc was tested on a phyBOARD-Pollux i.MX8M Plus [1] with
> > BSP-Yocto-Ampliphy-i.MX8MP-PD24.1.2 [2].
> > 
> > Supported boot devices are currently only MMC devices, but it should be
> > possible to add SPI flashes in the future.
> 
> It's quite a late comment, but this implementation has really nothing
> specific to do with MMC, you could just support any block device.
> 
> So if you could just add a config selecting the block type, defaulting
> to mmc, this could be used on any block like USB, UFS, NVMe, ... with
> almost 0 changes.

I raised this with v1. The challenge is that RAUC itself doesn't yet
support non-MMC options. If/when that changes it's easy to update here.

-- 
Tom
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