install: Support reinstallation (factory reset)

[cgwalters]

#137 is tracking part of this, a lot of related discussion in coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker#399

Basically we should support something like bootc install factory-reset that would configurably wipe local system state.

On the implementation side...I think the best way to do this would be something like:

• Create new deployment with fresh etc targeting a new stateroot
• Boot into it
• optional: clean up old deployment + stateroot

The beauty of this approach is that the "factory reset" would actually also be fully transactional, i.e. you could roll back into the previous state. It'd be easy to copy over any desired state (SSH host keys, cached container images e.g.) from the previous boot before deleting it.

Active work

• install: Add reset #1389

Goals:

• Make stateroots more visible, e.g. at least status should show them if different
• Need to support explicit pruning of deployments e.g. bootc deployment rm (like ostree admin undeploy) so that I can get rid of old stateroots

Ideas:

• Add bootc mount <deployment> /run/tmp-next-root so that I can cp -a --reflink=always /var/home /run/tmp-next/root/var/home

[cgwalters]

BTW one tricky thing in this is kernel arguments...cc #401

And also related to this, we should probably go to some effort to preserve the original kargs.

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An entirely different way to implement this would be to retain a pinned version of the original installed deployment. Some people will want to do that, and we already effectively support it with ostree admin pin. However...rolling back to that in the general case will imply rolling back to something pretty outdated, which we don't want to encourage. So I think we should focus more on better capturing and maintaining the bits of state that we want from that which mostly I think boils down to kargs.

[cgwalters]

One question came up tangentially related to this too - why does the current install integration test suite not work on an ostree based system?

First there's two things; the to-disk code; that works everywhere, it's easy we just use loopback.

For the alongside install tests, it's basically because of this. We'd need to be sure to use an alternative stateroot vs the booted one, etc.

[vrothberg]

I'd love to have such a reset functionality for bootc-{switch,update} as well.

[kfox1111]

Maybe an option to reset state on just a single file in etc or a path under etc too, rather then a complete reset.