New image organization and snap format

[Michael Vogt]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 04:26:13PM -0200, Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
> This is (perhaps) the last major change which I'd like to raise attention
> to, and it's perhaps one of the most disruptive and exciting ones too.
> 
> In the coming weeks we'll be landing relevant changes related to how the
> ubuntu core image itself is organized, and also to the packaged format of
> snaps. The new format is not backwards compatible, but there are relevant
> benefits that will become apparent as that work lands and unrolls. Michael
> Vogt is leading these changes for quite some time now, and we're expecting
> them to become visible in the following weeks.

We made some good progress here in the last few weeks and there is an
experimental "all-snap" image available at:

  https://people.canonical.com/~mvo/all-snaps/ [1]

This image is build using a kernel and os squashfs snap. It also fully
supports squashfs application snaps [2] as well as 15.04 snaps.

The amd64 image is build from the store and can be updated from the
store. There is also an armhf (beagle bone black) image which is using
sideloaded kernel/os snaps (sideloaded because of some open questions
about architecture handling in the store).

There is more work to do, but this is an important milestone on the
road to 16.04!

Cheers,
 Michael

[1] Created with the ubuntu-device-flash in that same directory which
    is build from lp:~snappy-dev/goget-ubuntu-touch/all-snaps
[2] Only hello-world.mvo and the ubuntu-{core,kernel} snaps are
    squashfs snaps at this point.