My memory is hazy but here's how I remember it: After Red Hat acquired CoreOS they announced their intent to rebase the entire thing around rpm-ostree, which is the CoreOS people know today: https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/
At the time there was some anxiety in the community as to what would happen, as there was no direct upgrade path from old CoreOS to new CoreOS. Theoretically if we all believed the kool-aid we were drinking it's just a redeploy, no pets!
Kinvolk came along, forked it, and made Flatcar Linux, which kept the A/B partitioning system, and more crucially, let you just change a config file and all your old CoreOS nodes would just move to Flatcar and then you were good to go. So now if you wanted to stay on the system you were comfortable with you could just use Flatcar. If the composability of rpm-ostree attracted you then new CoreOS have you covered. Red Hat deserves a hat tip here because in their documentation/blog they explicitly mentioned Flatcar as an option for people who wanted to stick with what they know, which I thought was cool and how I discovered it!
Later on Microsoft acquired Kinvolk and and then people raised eyebrows. I have not checked in a while but the folks involved continued to do their thing and run it like a good OSS project, hold public meetings, all that stuff. Microsoft gets a good hat tip here.
jcastro|2 years ago
What happened was old school CoreOS was A/B partition based: https://github.com/coreos/docs/blob/master/os/sdk-disk-parti...
My memory is hazy but here's how I remember it: After Red Hat acquired CoreOS they announced their intent to rebase the entire thing around rpm-ostree, which is the CoreOS people know today: https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/
At the time there was some anxiety in the community as to what would happen, as there was no direct upgrade path from old CoreOS to new CoreOS. Theoretically if we all believed the kool-aid we were drinking it's just a redeploy, no pets!
Kinvolk came along, forked it, and made Flatcar Linux, which kept the A/B partitioning system, and more crucially, let you just change a config file and all your old CoreOS nodes would just move to Flatcar and then you were good to go. So now if you wanted to stay on the system you were comfortable with you could just use Flatcar. If the composability of rpm-ostree attracted you then new CoreOS have you covered. Red Hat deserves a hat tip here because in their documentation/blog they explicitly mentioned Flatcar as an option for people who wanted to stick with what they know, which I thought was cool and how I discovered it!
Later on Microsoft acquired Kinvolk and and then people raised eyebrows. I have not checked in a while but the folks involved continued to do their thing and run it like a good OSS project, hold public meetings, all that stuff. Microsoft gets a good hat tip here.
I use both and they're both high quality.