Transactional Updates with Btrfs
09-20, 14:50–15:30 (Europe/Berlin), Cage

Transactional updates (also called atomic updates) are a way to update a system without interfering with the currently running system - making this a rock-solid way to update any machine, from embedded systems to cluster nodes.


What do openSUSE MicroOS, Fedora CoreOS, Chrome OS, Ubuntu Core and Android have in common? All of them are using a read-only root file system and so called transactional / atomic updates to update a system safely - without having to worry that a broken update could leave your system in some undefined state.

This talk will focus on how to use btrfs' snapshot feature to implement such a transactional system and explain where the pitfalls of implementing such a system compared to a traditional read-write system are.

See also: Presentation slides (4.1 MB)

Has been working on Linux distributions for over 10 years and joined SUSE as a Research Engineer in 2018; currently working on transactional-update, Ignition, IMA/EVM and openSUSE MicroOS related topics.

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