• 1 Post
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle







  • I don’t know if this works in docker (usually there is 1:1 equivalency between the two), but with podman you can do something like:

    podman stop --filter name=foo
    

    man podman-stop tells us:

       --filter, -f=filter
           Filter what containers are going to be stopped.  Multiple filters can be given with multiple uses of the --filter flag.  Filters with the same  key  work
           inclusive with the only exception being label which is exclusive. Filters with different keys always work exclusive.
    

  • If you do a rollback, I assume your data remains? I assume you might need to reinstall apps which were not in the original? Or does it keep apps, data and settings across a restore?

    In CoreOS (Silverblue), /etc, /var and /home (which is in fact a symlink towards /var/home) are regular writable partitions, so your data, configs and personal files are not touched by the upgrade/rollback procedure.

    All the packages (and their dependencies) you’ve installed extra are also upgraded/rolledback when you do a system upgrade.


  • The immutable part (again, only speaking about Silverblue, I don’t know about others) refers to the inability to make changes online (i.e. without rebooting), but you can eventually change whatever file you want. The way it works is you would make your changes in a copy of the current filesystem and at boot simply mount and use the copy. If something goes wrong, you just mount the original at next boot and you have rolled back.


  • You make a lot of good points, but I have to disagree on the “don’t let the user see or touch anything”. That’s very much not the way immutable distros behave (and I speak mostly about Fedora Silverblue here, I don’t have experience with other immutable systems): you can touch and change anything and often times you have mechanisms put in place by the distro developers to do exactly that. It’s just that the way you make changes is very different from classical distros, that’s all, but you can definitely customize and change whatever you want. I feel the comparison between immutable distros and Apple is really far off: Apple actively prevents users from making changes, while immutable Linux is the opposite – while there may be some technical limitations, the devs try to empower the user as much as possible.








  • I’ve been using the same Silverblue installation for about two years (maybe even more than that). Initially, I did a lot of tweaking because I didn’t really know how to approach toolbox and flatpaks, especially because I don’t use Gnome as my desktop environment, so this system went from standard Silverblue to Silverblue+i3 overlayed, then to Silverblue+sway overlayed, recently it got rebased to Sericea and it’s still running like day one. It also got upgraded from version 35(-ish) to 38 still without any issues (well, I did have some issues, but I simply rolled back and that fixed it).

    I’m also deploying several Fedora CoreOS servers with a similar level of success, but those mainly tend to just run some containers, so I would say I mess way less with those, it’s been mostly just update/upgrade to the latest, check if podman is still running my containers and let them be.


  • For all my non-compliant, non-supported hosts I started using Fedora CoreOS quite successfully.

    If you package your applications as containers, you should have a very easy time with it. It’s based off ostree, which means a couple of things:

    • immutable (so not easy to break, I guess?)
    • atomic upgrades, which means you upgrade in a single step
    • atomic and full rollbacks, which means if an upgrade breaks your host, you can rollback to the exact previous version booted simply by choosing it from grub
    • still based on rpm, so you will still have a grasp of it, even though many things are completely different
    • other benefits I forgot, I’m sure :)

    All with the added benefit that once you go towards containers you can change your distro with minimal effort, so there’s that.