Manual Upgrades

Upgrades can be run manually from the terminal.

Kairos images are released on quay.io.

Listing available versions

Using the agent, you can list all the available versions to upgrade to.

$ sudo kairos-agent upgrade list-releases
v0.57.0
v0.57.0-rc2
v0.57.0-rc1
v0.57.0-alpha2
v0.57.0-alpha1

Upgrading the active system

To specify an image, use the --source flag:

sudo kairos-agent upgrade --source <type>:<address>

Where type can be dir or oci and address is the path to the directory in the dir case or the <repo/image:tag> combination in the oci case.

For example, if you wanted to upgrade to the latest available stable release you could run the following command:

sudo kairos-agent upgrade --source oci:quay.io/kairos/@flavor:@flavorRelease-standard-amd64-generic-v3.2.4-k3sv1.31.3-k3s1

Once you have tested the new system and are happy with it, you can upgrade the recovery system.

Upgrading the recovery system

The recovery system is there for a reason, to help you recover the active system in case of failure. This is why we don’t allow upgrading the active system and recovery one at the same time and it needs to be done in a separate step. It’s advised to also upgrade the recovery system often, to keep it close to the active one. This will make sure you have a familiar system to work with, when you boot to the recovery system instead of an old image you haven’t used for quite a long time.

To make this process less error prone, the upgrade command provides an extra flag that will upgrade the recovery only. It uses the same system and flags as the normal upgrade.

sudo kairos-agent upgrade --recovery --source oci:quay.io/kairos/@flavor:@flavorRelease-standard-amd64-generic-v3.2.4-k3sv1.31.3-k3s1

What about the passive system?

The passive system is the one that is not running. It is not possible to upgrade it directly. The passive system will be upgraded when the active system is rebooted.

Upgrading single entries (trusted boot installations)

On systems installed in “trusted boot” mode, it’s not possible to edit the cmdline without generating a new bootable image because the cmdline is part of the signed artifact. For this reason, custom cmdlines are generated as separate artifacts at build time. Being different artifacts though, means that they will need to be upgraded too.

This can be achieved by passing the name of the efi file (without the extension) to the upgrade command like this:

kairos-agent upgrade --source oci:quay.io/kairos/@flavor:@flavorRelease-standard-amd64-generic-v3.2.4-k3sv1.31.3-k3s1 --boot-entry <efi_file_name_here>

You can find the efi file name by listing all the efi files in the installed system:

ls /efi/EFI/kairos/*.efi