Version control the Linux distro, ideas

[Darshit Desai]

Hello Modal AI team,

I have a general question on linux distro. How does the version control of a Linux distro happen? I know this is a simple Google search, but from what I have observed in voxl upgrade tarballs there are two folder voxl-suite and system-image, I was under the impression that to make a system image a person can just use the dd command and make a backup.img file but modal AI seems to be using something more complicated than that. This is coming from my very limited knowledge of making backup system images of raspberry pi 3.

I have a bunch of drones and I am working on drone swarms and its always annoying to install the deb files one by one and revving up the versions, right now there hasn't been any changes in the rootfs or the core root drivers and stuff but I wanted to know if there is an architecture that I should follow just for my knowledge. I also have to change a number of bash files manually right now to make sure the dds servers start as I want in a similar fashion on all drones which is pretty annoying.

Any tooling that you use like dockers, ci tools, cross compile etc

[Alex Kushleyev]

@Darshit-Desai , In short,

• the VOXL2 system image contains the main Linux OS that is built from open source components and it also contains open-source and closed-source components that are specific to Qualcomm hardware. Building the system image uses bitbake and a very long manifest which has a list of SW components, their exact version and source, as well as order in which the components should be built).
• you cannot use dd to back up and restore system partitions, as you may be able to do on a Raspberry Pi. Fastboot is the tool that is used to properly install the system partitions.
• voxl-suite is a collection of software that is installed on top of the base OS on VOXL2. For each SDK version, we also have a manifest of each component and version that should go into the SDK.

Can you clarify which deb files you mean in its always annoying to install the deb files one by one and revving up the versions -- are you updating SDK or installing your some other deb files?

It sounds like you may have per vehicle configuration (every set up is slightly different). You can differentiate the VOXL2 boards using the SoC serial number (cat /sys/devices/soc0/serial_number) and do your custom install based on the serial number. Basically you would have your own "manifest" of some type that may have common parts but also describe different settings for different boards (IP address, etc). You can maintain different bash files for each board and install them based on the serial number.

Alex