Re:Samsung bricked their home theater systems through automa...
by boricj on Friday March 14, 2025 @06:45PM
(#43368119)
Fortunately, it's a single no-frills MCU running the Zephyr RTOS. It does communicate with another system, but they are so very loosely coupled to the point that we really don't care whatever is running on the other side.
I won't get into details, but in some of the horrors stories I've heard the distributed system happened to be entirely software in nature. There are plenty of creative ways to mess up an upgrade on a uniprocessor system.
This sort of functional interdependency has become increasingly common in embedded these days with heterogenous SoCs.
One thing I've seen before is to separate downloading from rebooting, broadcast the manifest for the updates between all the independent processors (all updates need a declarative manifest for so, so many reasons) to check locally, and only proceed when they all agree. Rollbacks are initiated if they can't see everyone with their expected versions afterwards.
Still isn't perfect either.