GNOME OS + systemd-sysupdate (asg2024)

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As a reference for developers and testers, GNOME OS is an experimental Linux distribution that ships the latest in-development GNOME desktop, core applications, and stack. GNOME OS is currently using OSTree, this talk covers the ongoing work to add features to systemd-sysupdate and transition to it. Features like optional transfers, delta updates, and major version upgrades. GNOME OS is an experimental Linux distribution that ships the latest in-development GNOME desktop, core applications, and stack. It serves as a reference for developers and testers. This operating system is designed and built around the modern systemd and GNU-based userland built from the Freedesktop SDK. Currently, GNOME OS uses OSTree to deploy the root filesystem and manage updates. This means that the base OS is immutable (read-only) and updates can be quickly downloaded as deltas. OSTree allows easy rollback to multiple previous versions of the root filesystem, which is essential for a testing-first distribution focused on finding bugs. Our work focuses on transitioning GNOME OS to use systemd-sysupdate. Migrating to sysupdate would bring the following benefits: * Provide a trust chain from the bootloader, all the way up, both online and offline; * Achieve a closer integration with systemd; * Advance our support for image-based design and its benefits, e.g., immutability, auto-updating, adaptability, factory reset, uniformity and other modernised security properties around image-based OSes. For that, we are adding a number of features to systemd-sysupdate to make it more production ready; * Implement optional transfers in systemd-sysupdate * sysupdate should allow upgrading to a newer major version * pluggable backends for systemd-sysupdate (or systemd-import) This project was partly inspired by Lennart Pottering's article "Brave New Trusted Boot World", in which he explains a vision of the future of Linux systems. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/ about this event: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2024/talk/MGDHYQ/