Raspberry Pi OTA Mechanism

A mechanism to update Raspberry Pi OS image by Pi itself. To achieve updating Raspberry Pi software without removing SD card.

Instructions

WARNING: This project just an idea and only test on RaspiOS from 2021-03-04 to 2021-05-07. Do not try this instructions on your important OS image.

Copy this project and Raspberry Pi OS image to Raspberry Pi. Run the following commands:

$ cp <your raspios.img> rasberrypi-ota/
$ cd raspberrypi-ota
$ sudo ./ota.sh

It will takes much times. Please wait and do not poweroff. Suggest using debug port to monitor the progress.

Flowchart

OTA (Over-the-Air)

Over-the-air programming (OTA programming) refers to various methods of distributing new software, configuration settings, and even updating encryption keys to devices.

Initrd (Initial ramdisk)

Initrd (initial ramdisk) is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, which may be used as part of the Linux startup process.

Busybox

BusyBox is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file.