Software is steadily increasing its complexity and this raises the size of a whole Update. SWUpdate allows incremental updates based on filesystem, and single file updates are possible. A good update concept will still allow lightweight updates without losing on reliability, but more care must be taken to handle all use cases. A well known way for reliable updates is to replace the whole filesystem as a single binary, but of course the size can be in term of several hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes.
But what about to update just the part of the giant blob that was changed between two updates ? This is more complex than replacing a single file, but it guarantees the maximum reliability and the installed software will be exactly the same as the one built on your host. This is more important in case you sign the software, and in all case secure boot is required on your device.
The “Delta Handler” in SWUpdate addresses these topics. Thanks to the “rolling hash” theory, SWUpdate is able to compute on the device itself which part of the binary blobs are different and to download only the changed parts, strongly reducing the size of the downloaded data. And this maintaining all features present in SWUpdate. Do not trust to fairy tale: not any frog will turn into a prince !
And of course: still everything Open Source !