ShrekOS Can Update Itself Now. I Know Because I Broke It First.
I have been calling ShrekOS an immutable operating system for a while now. That sounds nice. It also does not mean very much if the machine cannot safely replace itself. So this week I stopped talking about the update design and made the thing actually update. Not "downloaded some metadata." Not "the signatures verified." Not "systemd-sysupdate saw a newer version." I mean: ShrekOS discovered a…
ShrekOS, an immutable operating system, has gained the ability to update itself. The reporter discovered this by intentionally breaking the system itself. The update process involves writing the new system to a separate slot and then booting it. If successful, the old system remains available for rollback. The update server was designed to be simple and independent, without relying on the reporter's personal infrastructure.
The update endpoint is a Cloudflare Worker that fronts the public release artifacts. The reporter ensured that the update process followed a boring and explicit chain of trust, from offline signing authority to the secure boot of the new system. During testing, the reporter encountered an issue where the compressed release artifact was written directly into the system partition, causing the dm-verity to fail during boot.
The problem was traced back to the release pipeline publishing the system image compressed with Zstandard instead of decompressing it before writing.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
