Tomatoaster

A Linux distribution with ChromeOS-like updates - AB partition scheme.

Builds a somewhat reproducible squashfs rootfs image of something resembling Xubuntu.

There's a script generating a delta image.

It uses Void Linux packages and xbps-src to build the image.

Requirements:

• Linux 4.14+
• bash
• wget
• git
• gcc

TODO:

• modularize the image generation script
• actually reliably booting the image
• installation
• updates
  • a delta image between the same version should be empty
• make it depend only on what is provided by xbps and xbps-src

Updates - WIP

Generation of the delta image is done via rsync and overlayfs. A crude pseudo-script to do the update itself as below:

wget http://tomatoaster.org/updates/delta1.sqfs
mount /dev/root old
mount delta1.sqfs delta
mount -t overlay new-root-gen-overlay \
        -o lowerdir=old:delta new
mksquashfs new /dev/root2 -all-root
bootloader-trigger
notify-send "Update is ready. Restart to update."

There is a possible optimization to use bsdiff for changed files in the delta image.