Proposed F19 Feature: Fedora Upgrade - using yum

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 25, 2013, at 9:20 PM, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> wrote:

> William Brown writes:
> 
>> In the future, hopefully once btrfs is a bit more mature, perhaps it
>> could be considered to make a new writable snapshot subvolume of the
>> system, and the use yum prefix to update the new subvolume. When you
>> reboot, the new subvolume can become the new root.
>> 
>> a) Currently running system files aren't affected.
>> b) All upgrades are done online
>> c) the update would merely be a switching of the root device on next
>> reboot
>> d) you could even roll-back by remounting the old root subvolume as the
>> root fs.
> 
> Now, what's not clear to me – what exactly happens if, say, at the same time I'm browsing the web at the same time, watching videos. That generates write activity, changes to the disk, so what happens to all other disk activity while the upgrade takes place.

Disk contention, and things may be sluggish. Chances are your videos won't stutter, but I guess that depends on the video bit rate, effectiveness of disk and file system read ahead, and application buffering all are.


Chris Murphy