RFIDService/UpdatePolicy

RFID Service Update Policy

Revision 5.1.1, 2014-08-15

In order to provide a more stable environment for testing and deployment, and to help manage our support resources, we are moving to a staged release process internally. This will also help with future coordination of upgrades. There will be three main branches for devices going forward:

vrfrv2-linux-event-beta

Development branch, follows the latest build and is used for testing new features internally. May have breakage and/or significant debug output.

vrfrv2-linux-event

Stable branch, follows the latest stable build. This is the main vrfrv2-linux-event build. Adds features as they are marked stable.

vrfrv2-linux-event-5.1

Release branch, which contains a frozen feature set and is recommended for deployments in the field. This will be maintained with backports from newer branches on bug fixes, but will remain constant and will gain no new major features. Of course, upgrades to newer versions of the service are still possible but they are more manual.

Customer-specific / Hotfix branch policy

At this point, we are making a major push to move customers from specific release branches back to one of the above branches. We will continue the current process of branching a separate frozen branch for a specific customer only when absolutely necessary; we are working on providing a more modular way of managing any customer-specific business logic or code so this can be supported more easily if required.

Update Instructions

In order to update the RFID service on a device, you can use the opkg command. In this example we are moving a device from the stable branch to the 5.1.x release branch series.

• SSH or use a serial cable to access the device console.
• Run the command opkg update to fetch the latest available package versions.

root@vr-8fa5b4:~# opkg update
Downloading http://embedded.ventureresearch.com/yocto/dora/ipk/vr-am33-shelf/Packages.gz.
Inflating http://embedded.ventureresearch.com/yocto/dora/ipk/vr-am33-shelf/Packages.gz.
Updated list of available packages in /var/lib/opkg/vr-am33-shelf.
Downloading http://embedded.ventureresearch.com/yocto/dora/ipk/armv7a-vfp-neon/Packages.gz.
Inflating http://embedded.ventureresearch.com/yocto/dora/ipk/armv7a-vfp-neon/Packages.gz.
Updated list of available packages in /var/lib/opkg/armv7a-vfp-neon.
Downloading http://embedded.ventureresearch.com/yocto/dora/ipk/all/Packages.gz.
Inflating http://embedded.ventureresearch.com/yocto/dora/ipk/all/Packages.gz.
Updated list of available packages in /var/lib/opkg/all.

• See the installed version of the service by running opkg list-installed | grep vrfrv2-linux. This device is on the stable branch, and has version 5.1.1 installed.

root@vr-8fa5b4:~# opkg list-installed | grep vrfrv2-linux
vrfrv2-linux-config - 1.0-r1
vrfrv2-linux-event - 5.1.1-r1381
vrfrv2-linux-event-db - 5.1.1-r1381
vrfrv2-linux-event-dbpurge - 5.1.1-r1381

• To move to a different branch, first remove the old version installed:

root@vr-8fa5b4:~# opkg remove vrfrv2-linux-event
Removing package vrfrv2-linux-event from root...
Ending RFID Reader Driver...done.
Removing any system startup links for rfid ...
/etc/rc0.d/K93rfid
...
/etc/rc6.d/K93rfid

• Then install the requested branch:

root@vr-8fa5b4:~# opkg install vrfrv2-linux-event-5.1
Installing vrfrv2-linux-event-5.1 (5.1.1-r1381) to root...
Downloading http://embedded.ventureresearch.com/yocto/dora/ipk/armv7a-vfp-neon/vrfrv2-linux-event-5.1_5.1.1-r1381_armv7a-vfp-neon.ipk.
Configuring vrfrv2-linux-event-5.1.
Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/rfid.
Starting Venture Research RFID Reader Driver: forkliftreader_linux...done.

On the next opkg update / opkg upgrade operation, this will fetch the latest available version on the current branch.

It is recommended that all customers move to a version >= 5.1.1.