Re: [yocto] Rockchip project: opinions on RAUC vs SWUpdate?

Howdy!

My $.02 here, as I'm officially biased (Mender pays my bills).

All of the mentioned solutions have their respective pros and cons
(surprise!) but also all are able to provide a robust A/B update
scheme. My stash of random assorted thoughts here:
- SWupdate's image generation workflow, as Quentin mentioned, is a bit
"unexpected". It works (obviously), but takes a bit of getting used
to. Where SWupdate really shines if you don't want to do OTA at all,
but local-first installers, and need to cater for hardware versions,
quirks, and all of those things there, as it can have very advanced,
local, per-installation logic.
- RAUC is a strong solution (to me) if you want to do OTA without the
management. A hands-off, device driven deployment flow where all of
the logic lives in the client and you just want to drop the update
artifact on a HTTPS/FTP server is RAUCs super strong case, I think
they call it adaptive update deployment or something really similar.
- Menders claim to fame is the end-to-end offer. If you develop for a
fleet of devices which is meant to be managed (in terms of OTA
updates) by a singular entity, usually the manufacturer. Deployments
in stages, based on geolocation, or orthogonal (rootfs vs. application
vs. containers), no problem.

I definitely wouldn't claim that any one of these is "better" than the
others, but definitely "some are better suited for some use cases and
requirements than others". Which one applies to you, or anybody who
reads this, I cannot judge.
As always, happy to discuss the ins and outs of this :)

Greetz,
Josef

On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 10:54 AM Quentin Schulz via
lists.yoctoproject.org
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi Robert,
>
> On 4/30/26 12:17 AM, Robert P. J. Day via lists.yoctoproject.org wrote:
> >
> >    (I was going to poke Rockchip guru Quentin Schulz privately about
> > this but figured, might as well get lots of opinions.)
> >
> >    I'm working on a new Rockchip project and while previous projects
> > here have assumed using SWUpdate for OTA updates, I notice that the
> > meta-rockchip layer's README refers to an example of using RAUC for
> > A/B updates:
> >
> >    https://git.yoctoproject.org/meta-rockchip/tree/README#n125
> >
> >    I'm curious ... do the Rockchip folks prefer RAUC to SWUpdate? I'm
> > not wedded to SWUpdate and am open to arguments for trying RAUC
> > instead. Thoughts?
> >
>
> Trevor did the A/B thing on meta-rockchip with rauc. He's using it for
> his devices as far as I know. My previous company was using SWUpdate
> with Yocto, my current RAUC with Buildroot. I have not integrated
> either. I've done some work on SWUpdate in meta-cherry-es which I
> presented at the Yocto Project Developer Day last year, see
> https://pretalx.com/ypdd-amsterdam-2025/talk/ZRLTMG/. It was recorded
> but I don't see it on YoctoProject's YouTube channel. I really disliked
> the way swupdate handles images. As far as I remember, you have an
> SRC_URI in your image recipe (which doesn't make sense) for configuring
> your image. I was tickled by some "smart" things being done to the
> swupdate recipe to figure out what to enable at build time based on
> what's in the swupdate defconfig. This is broken logic and didn't work
> well if I remember correctly.
>
> If you're looking to provision your devices during manufacturing, RAUC
> won't be useful as it's explicitly stated RAUC is not made for that.
> SWUpdate (as shown during my talk) can be somewhat forced to do this.
>
> There's also Mender which can be a paid solution with commercial
> support, I'm sure Josef can do a pep talk here.
>
> In the end, read the docs, try things out. It's like asking which of vim
> or emacs is better, you only will know what's best.
>
> Cheers,
> Quentin
>
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