Hi @simon-77
Thanks for all the discussion and your willingness to “play around” with Rockstor; that’s great to see! I don’t have all the answers you seek but I see that @Hooverdan already answered much of it :-). I still wanted to chip in a bit in the hopes it can still provide you with additional elements of answers.
I do believe that being able to support transactional updates was part of @phillxnet’s plan when he worked on moving the Project from Centos to openSUSE. This was with the “transactional server” role offered to Leap at the time (15.1, I believe?) in mind. This does come with its own particularities about the BTRFS organization/structure for the OS, though, which given the already massive task of moving between OSes was left to a future plan. Now that the “transactional server” role is not really the future and that MicroOS will/does address this need, there was indeed some interest in it.
We’ve had a brief discussion on the matter in our rockstor-core repo, for instance:
You’ll find a lot of “historical” resources and references in @phillxnet’s input there, alongside a detailed explanation of confirmation on the interest in being able to support transactional updates.
Of course, with the coming of ALP, things may change again in the near future so we’re keeping an eye on how the future of Leap looks like so that we can adapt accordingly.
@Hooverdan is entirely correct. We actually had AppArmor on in the early openSUSE builds, but we hit issues with it and had to disable it, with the intent on turning it back on once ready. The dev thread below should give you a good idea on what happened exactly (search for Apparmor as that can be quite long):
Oh good to know! I knew there were discussions on switching to SELinux but didn’t it already happened!
@phillxnet would most likely be the most knowledgeable on that; I unfortunately was not knowledgeable enough during our CentOS days, I’m afraid.