[MinnowBoard] about system update

[Simon Glass]

Hi,

On 1 April 2015 at 00:13, Дмитрий Оботуров <oboturoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In our project based on MinnowBoard Max we are planning to use two SATA
> disks for storage of two OS images. It is required for failure tolerance
> during updating the system and for failure of SATA disks.
>
> Operating procedure looks like the following:
> - During updating the system is rewriting on the disk which is not booting
> at the moment.
> - There is the efi variable named "os_changed". os_changed=1 in the system
> in the case of OS updatig and if the change of the boot disk is required.
> - There is the efi variable named "first_boot_done", which is used for
> algorithm correctness verifying of a new OS version.
> - After recording of a new OS version on the disk the system is rebooting.
> The variable "os_changed" is beeing analysed during rebooting. If
> os_changed=1 then:
>  1. the booting disk is changed
>  2. first_boot_done=0
> - By successful booting the OS and successful starting up the software
> first_boot_done=1, if something is wrong then the value of "first_boot_done"
> is equal to zero, os_changed=0 and the system are rebooting.
> - After rebooting the state of the variable "os_changed" and
> "first_boot_done" is analysing. If both of the variables are equal to 0,
> then the updated OS was not booted correctly and it is required to place
> back the previous boot disk.
>
> So we are planning to work out a problem of software fault tolerance  and
> power supply of the updating system. We tested this procedure in our
> embedded systems where we use the ARM processors and UBOOT loader.

I'm not sure if this helps, but since you are familiar with U-Boot you
might consider using U-Boot with MinnowBoard Max. There is reasonable
mainline support for that board now.

>
> For the first time we deal with X86 and EFI and we have the following
> question how to realyse this procedure in EFI enviroment in the best way.
>
> We consider the followng variant at the moment:
> 1. To embed the analysis codes "os_changed" and "first_boot_done" into the
> code EFI.
>
>
> Perhaps there are any other ways of working out this problem. Because of the
> fact that we are newcomers in EFI we kindly ask the commnity to give us the
> professional advise for working out this problem in the best way in the
> point of safety and easy-to-use.
>
> Thank you.

Regards,
Simon