Firmware and Control UI OTA updates

[valeriansaliou]

As the RPi will now be plugged right to the motherboard, it will have the ability to flash the firmware by itself.

This opens a room for OTA updates (on demand, not automatic, of course).

Where the Pi would start by updating its Control UI, and then inject the firmware binary contained in its Control UI, if the motherboard fw version is older than the UI contained fw.

As fw updates are more rare and subject to regulatory approval, we could use this mechanism to provide frequent UI updates and fixes, and less frequent fw updates.

The Pi would need to be wired to the Internet over Ethernet. Update packages would be crypto signed using a central authority.

As well, if the UI update fails, the Pi would have a way to roll back to the previous binary by using a rolling mechanism where binary N-1 would always be kept.

Mikrotik routers use a similar update protocol, where the OS is first updated and then the bootloader gets updated as needed after reboot.