ath79: sysupgrade format policy for ar71xx migrations

[David Bauer]

Hi Sven,

sorry for the late reply.

Firs to fall, there is no real policy on that one, as OpenWrt itself does not
advertise support for cross-target upgrades. It might work, or it might not.

On 11/25/20 8:53 AM, Sven Eckelmann wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 November 2020 08:58:04 CET Sven Eckelmann wrote:
> [...]
>> Now to the actual question:
> 
> I will just add some extra info to the options shown below. Maybe it makes 
> then more sense why I've added two gluon developers to the Cc.
> 
>> What should the OpenMesh devices use as images for ath79:
>>
>> 1. CE01 factory + sysupgrade-tar (like the OpenMesh IPQ40xx devices)
> 
> This would say this makes definitely sense for new devices. But in freifunk-
> gluon's context, this would mean that the autoupdater cannot automatically 
> upgrade from ar71xx to ath79.

I don't have a great overview over the current situation, but as much as i would
like to avoid having to push a pre-ath79 upgrade firmware with integrated per-device
upgrade paths, i think we can hardly avoid having to do such a thing, the alternative
being to EOL said boards.

In this specific case, adding a second sysupgrade image (be it gluon-downstream) and using
this as a transition image for the older releases might work or would it? We might also
modify the autoupdater to first try fetching an image specific to the target the device is
currently running to provide an upgrade paths for both targets. What do you think?

Best wishes
David

> 
> So if this is preferred, then there is at least a manual way to upgrade a 
> freifunk-gluon node to ath79. And this would be a "good" opportunity to get 
> rid of the CE01 upgrade code.
> 
> But maybe there is also a solution for this in gluon's context. David and 
> Matthias might know more about this.
> 
>> 2. CE01 factory + CE01 sysupgrade (like ar71xx)
> 
> At the moment, I would rather drop the factory image and not use this option. 
> This would (in my eyes) only be necessary when some tools are not able to deal 
> with the metadata at the end of the sysupgrade image.
> 
>> 3. CE01 sysupgrade (like ar71xx but avoid having two files with the same 
>>    content)
> 
> With this option, we would (hopefully) have a clean upgrade path with 
> freifunk-gluon's autoupdater. The dualboot_datachk sysupgrade code can be 
> adjusted to just work with CE01 images by creating some kind of hybrid between 
> the old upgrade/openmesh.sh and the new upgrade/dualboot_datachk.sh. Or the 
> old upgrade/openmesh.sh (minus some unnecessary steps) can just be reused.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 	Sven
> 
> 
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