I’ve released rpm-ostree 2014.3. Up until now, the main public consumer of OSTree has been gnome-continuous, which has operated as a live research project in CI/CD. But I very intentionally from the start split out OSTree as a potentially sharable project with other build systems (such as dpkg/rpm).

Now that rpm-ostree is a functioning demo, it will help explain the vision and technology behind OSTree much better. Before I do that, let me talk about Continuous briefly. It has two trees that it ships, the refnames are gnome-continuous/buildmaster/x86_64-runtime and gnome-continuous/buildmaster/x86_64-devel-debug. I often just use the terms -runtime and -devel-debug for short since the other bits are usually implicit. -runtime is a basic install, comparable to what one might get from a default Debian or Fedora type live CD desktop install. -devel-debug is that plus *all* of the developer tools (gcc, automake), plus developer apps (glade, anjuta).

I suspect however that nearly all of the Continuous users (GNOME developers and testers) use -devel-debug. So-runtime is there basically just to demonstrate that we can have multiple trees.

With rpm-ostree though, the set of software in Fedora is much, much larger. And it can be assembled in many, many, many different ways. rpm-ostree only captures at the moment a very tiny subset of those; these refnames look like this:

fedostree/20/x86_64/base/minimal
fedostree/rawhide/x86_64/base/minimal

Note that the single OSTree repository contains both 20 and rawhide versions of the trees. Here are some more refname examples; I’ve ommitted “rawhide” from the list for brevity:

fedostree/20/x86_64/server/docker-io
fedostree/20/x86_64/server/freeipa-server
fedostree/20/x86_64/workstation/gnome/core
fedostree/20/x86_64/workstation/gnome/default

For the actual content of these, take a look at the current products.json which generates these trees. It might also be illuminating to look at some build logs from today.

As I’ve said in a few places, this “medium” level of flexibility puts OSTree between the ultimate flexibility of packages, and the “Here is our OS, enjoy!” model of ChromeOS. Up until now, in my discussions with people about OSTree, I can often see them mentally trying trying to slot OSTree into either the “yet another package system” box, or the “yet another image update system” box. But it’s certainly not a package system (rather it complements existing ones), and it’s definitely more flexible than Chromium Autoupdate (but less efficient in some ways). For more details, see OSTree/RelatedProjects.

Okay, so we see now that OSTree allows storing multiple trees (with history). I only very recently landed this commit to OSTree to make switching between trees easier on client machines. Let’s try it; say you’ve installed the “fedostree/20/x86_64/base/minimal” ref. Now you want to change to the tree containing @standard along with docker-io. With the latest OSTree, this is just

# ostree admin switch fedostree/20/x86_64/server/docker-io

Semantically, this is somewhat like doing yum install @standard docker-io – except the transition is fully atomic. Furthermore, we get an exact replication of the tree from the build server; if for example we were transitioning from say the fedostree/20/workstation/gnome/core tree, then we wouldn’t get a mix of GNOME packages and docker-io. Our running GNOME tree would be untouched, still on disk, still running – when we reboot, then we’d be in the new server/docker-io tree. If we then did from inside the booted docker-io tree:

# ostree admin switch fedostree/20/workstation/gnome/core

Nothing would be downloaded (unless the ref was updated), and we’d be back to GNOME (again, atomically). All along this process, our changes to /etc will have a 3 way merge applied, and our data in /var will be carried along. So like image-based updates, OSTree is reliable and safe. But it has a bit of the flexibility of packages – I think OSTree could scale easily to 100 or more trees (with history!) being shipped by a vendor such as Fedora.

And of course, I’m not suggesting removing the packages as raw material – you can still compute your own filesystem trees locally. It needs some work to be made efficient – I’ll talk about that in a future post.