Red Hat engineers have been rewriting Greenboot in the Rust programming language to replace the Bash-written version of this generic health check framework for systemd, bootc, and RPM-OSTree based Linux environments. That Rust rewrite of Greenboot is now cleared for appearing in the Fedora Linux 43 release.
The modern Greenboot written in Rust provides health checks and rollback functionality for RPM-OSTree based systems as before and now bootc systems too. The functionality is effectively the same as the former Bash code and has played a big role in the likes of Fedora IoT.
The Fedora change proposal explains of the Greenboot-RS version:
“Current IoT Users should notice no changes, apart from their Greenboot version iterating after rpm-ostree upgrade. All functionality from previous Greenboot versions is retained, so the health check features they are used to will still remain.
Future IoT Users leveraging bootc will notice Greenboot support included when setting up IoT with bootc. These Users will now have access to the health check and rollback features Greenboot provides, and will start to see a Greenboot MOTD when booting their systems.”
Releasing the Greenboot Rust version as part of Fedora 43 is now approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.
