Updating Packages and Applications

Updating Layered Packages

Packages added to the Fedora IoT image with rpm-ostree install will be updated along with the base operating system when rpm-ostree upgrade is run as described in Updates and Rollbacks.

The rpm-ostree utility uses repositories configured in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. The Fedora IoT image is configured to check for packages from several Fedora repositories including the fedora-updates and fedora-updates-modular repositories.

In Fedora, before updates are generally available, they are tested in the fedora-updates-testing and fedora-updates-testing-modular repositories. The configuration files and gpg keys for these repositories are included in the Fedora IoT image but are not enabled by default.

To enable the testing repos, edit the configuration files in /etc/yum.repos.d and for each desired repository, change the enabled= line to enabled=1

$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates-testing-modular.repo
[updates-testing-modular] (1)
name=Fedora Modular $releasever - $basearch - Test Updates
failovermethod=priority
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/updates/testing/$releasever/Modular/$basearch/
metalink=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=updates-testing-modular-f$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=1  (2)
repo_gpgcheck=0
type=rpm
gpgcheck=1
metadata_expire=6h
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$releasever-$basearch
skip_if_unavailable=False

[updates-testing-modular-debuginfo]  (3)
name=Fedora Modular $releasever - $basearch - Test Updates Debug
failovermethod=priority

... Output Truncated ...

1	Each repository has a name in square brackets
2	The enabled parameter takes a boolean value
3	A configuration file can contain multiple repository configurations.

You can add additional repository configuration files to enable other update, testing, or development repositories.

Updating Containers

By placing applications in containers, the host operating system can be updated quickly without affecting package versions inside the container. But what about when the fix needs to be applied to packages that are a part of the container?

Containers are supposed to be lightweight, interchangeable, and ephemeral. When an container is in need of an update, it is removed and a new container is deployed in its place.

If your containers are built from another base image, you need to monitor that base image for updates and to rebuild your containers using the updated image.

The industry has a variety of services available to assist with vulnerability scanning, update notifications, build systems, and other CD/CI tools for containers.

It’s a good practice to not patch inside of a container as it does not scale well. Instead, build a new container and then deploy that container to many devices. A container available in a shared registry and tagged as 'latest' will be used the next time podman run requests that image.

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