PICOS Debian Package Upgrade User Guide

Owned by Tracy Yang
May 24, 2024
2 min read

Overview

PICOS provides five Debian packages from release 3.2 to let users upgrade some of the available components manually, or reinstall PICOS components in case some of them were broken.

Available PICOS Debian packages and the dependencies between them are described below:

  • picos-linux

   PICOS Linux Kernel, drivers and switching ASIC kernel modules

  • picos-vasic
    • PICOS VASIC and line card management libraries and utilities
    • Depends on picos-linux
  • picos-xorplus
    • PICOS Layer 2 and Layer 3 software package
    • Depends on picos-vasic, picos-utils
  • picos-ovs
    • PICOS OVS package
    • “picos-ovs” will have its own lib to access peripherals (such as FAN and PSU and LED) via sysfs
    • Depends on picos-vasic, picos-utils
  • picos-utils
    • PICOS common utilities and configuration files
    • System config files, systemd units
    • Common utility such as ZTP/diag

In this way, we do not need to upgrade the entire PICOS system if version changes only appear in one or several of the components. This provides an efficient and effective method of upgrading PICOS system.

NOTE：

Some PICOS component packages would depend on other parts, so the dependent ones should be installed first if they do not exist on the system.

How to use

When new releases of PICOS components have been made available to fix urgent issues, users can get the Debian packages from PICOS support team.

For example, the package users get might be "picos-xorplus-s4100-3.2.3-9dc8d94.deb" saved in the working directory.

To install the package, the following command is OK:

admin@Xorplus:~$ sudo dpkg -i picos-xorplus-s4100-3.2.3-9dc8d94.deb

After finishing upgrade, the switch will reboot automatically, the system will come up running the PICOS operating system with the new PICOS component.

NOTE：

If certain PICOS components have been removed from the running Linux system, this operation would be an installation instead of upgrade. In this case, users need to confirm the model compatibility manually by inputting `Yes` or `Y` at the prompt `Are you sure the model is MODEL (yes/no)?`

Verifying after Upgrade

We can use the following command to check the status of PICOS Debian packages after upgrade.

admin@Xorplus:~$ dpkg -l | grep picos-
ii  picos-linux               
ii  picos-ovs                 
ii  picos-utils               
ii  picos-vasic               
ii  picos-xorplus  

Here two “i” represent normal, the first one indicates that the package has been installed successfully. The second “i” indicates the installation dependencies between the components and configuration operations are successfully completed met.

Appendix

PICOS component package uninstall operation is provided as follows.

NOTE：

  • Uninstall the PICOS component packages may cause severe system errors, we strongly recommend not to uninstall any of the PICOS component package.
  • The uninstall operation will uninstall all packages that depend on this package, either directly or indirectly.
admin@Xorplus:~$ sudo apt remove picos-utils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  picos-utils
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
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