14 DAY TRIAL // The Snappy packages that are being worked on by Canonical are taking all the headlines and with good reason. They provide many advantages, and one of them is the ability to rollback an update, even for critical components, such as the Linux kernel.
It's difficult not to get excited about Snappy packages, even if a part of the community is still quite skeptical about them. Changing the packaging paradigm is not going to be an easy task for Canonical, especially after many years of working with apt and dpkg. Moving users from .deb to .snap will take some convincing, but in the end it will probably become clear that the new features will outweigh any problems.
The Snappy packages promise to bring all kinds of cool stuff, like the ability to install any software on basically any distro that supports them, without having to meet the dependencies in that system. Libraries and all the necessary components will be integrated by default, and users and developers alike won't be tied to a specific versions of the distribution. Another nice option is the ability to rollback any of the updates made, for any of the packages in the Linux distro, and the Linux kernel is one of the.
Rolling back from a kernel panic is extremely useful
One of the developers from Canonical, Sergio Schvezov, posted a very interesting video demonstrating how Snappy can be used to rollback from a kernel panic on Beagle Bone Black, although the same principles will be applied to any system, no matter their size or purpose, including desktops.
"Image you get an update and the kernel panics with that update, what are you to do? Suppose now that you have a snappy based system, this is automatically solved for you. Here’s a short video showing this on a Beagle Bone Black, the concept is quite simple, if there is a panic, we revert to the last known state. In this video I inject an initrd that panics on boot after issuing a snappy update and before rebooting into the update," wrote Sergio Schvezov on his blog.
You can check the video below and just imagine how much simpler life would be in the Linux world with a system that can just rollback any change that the user wants.
