[Starlingx-discuss] Questions on StarlingX upgrades

[Wensley, Barton]

Pratik – see my responses to your questions below.

Bart

From: Pratik M. <pvmpublic at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 1:33 AM
To: starlingx-discuss at lists.starlingx.io
Subject: [Starlingx-discuss] Questions on StarlingX upgrades

[Please note: This e-mail is from an EXTERNAL e-mail address]
Hi,
Looking at the URL below, I had a few questions to understand the overall upgrade strategy.
https://docs.starlingx.io/specs/specs/stx-4.0/approved/starlingx-2007403-platform-upgrades.html

Q1: Can I assume that from R4.0 onwards, the intent is that all future releases will support seamless upgrades for both minor and major versions.
[Bart] You can’t assume this because:

  1.  Upgrades are not supported for minor versions – moving from one minor version to the next would be done by building patches for the updated packages and applying them. The starlingx community does not provide patches – you would need to do this on your own (or use a commercial distribution of starlingx that supports patching).
  2.  Upgrades between major versions are supported by the infrastructure described in the specification you referenced above. However, the starlingx community does not  test or support upgrades. To do an upgrade, you would need to do your own upgrade testing and fix any issues you uncover. Upgrades often require additional changes on the “from” release side, so you would likely need to build your own patches as well.

Q2: Is downgrade an explicit non-goal?
[Bart] Correct – starlingx does not support downgrades.

Q3: Any hooks for non-stx applications to backup and restore their state?
[Bart] No

Q4: For a simplex edge node, it involves a N+1 ISO (re)installation. Is a more seamless option on the roadmap
[Bart] No

Q5. For a simplex edge subcloud, possible to orchestrate this from the central cloud?
[Bart] Similar to upgrades, there is an infrastructure for this (i.e. dcmanager upgrade-strategy commands). These  commands haven’t been included in the starlingx documentation yet and similar to upgrades, the starlingx community does not test or support these commands.

Q6: Any non-goals for the seamless upgrade, like say CentOS upgrade?.
[Bart] There has been no decision yet on whether starlingx will be moving to a new version of CentOS or to a different Linux distribution so I can’t comment on this yet.

Any pointers to additional info are very welcome.

Thanks in advance
Pratik
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