MBL version is not reported correctly in Pelion Cloud

[jjohnson-arm]

Description

There are certain instances when the Pelion Cloud will not report the correct version of MBL:

1. When you have flashed a disk image to your device.
2. When you use the command line tool (mbl-firmware-update-manager) to install a new root-fs.
3. Application versioning is not reported to the cloud.

If you use the Pelion Cloud update service to flash a root-fs to the board, the version will be captured correctly, and subsequent updates of the root-fs will also be displayed.

Issue request type

[ ] Question
[ ] Enhancement
[x] Bug

[ciarmcom]

Internal Jira reference: https://jira.arm.com/browse/MBLTRIAGE-5

[jonathanhaigh-arm]

As far as Pelion is concerned, the "version" of the software on a device is a timestamp indicating when the firmware update manifest that was last used to update the device was created.

Firmware update manifests aren't used for mbl-cli updates or the initial flashing of a device but when the Pelion cloud asks for information about the software is we can still respond with data containing a timestamp, so:

• When mbl-cli is used to perform an update, we create version data (a timestamp) based on the approximate time the update is received by the device. This version is then reported to Pelion when it requests the firmware version. This was implemented in https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbl-core/pull/74 and https://github.com/ARMmbed/meta-mbl/pull/367.
• During the Yocto build process, we create version data (a timestamp) based on the approximate time just before the final image is built which can be reported to Pelion as the software version. This was implemented in https://github.com/ARMmbed/meta-mbl/pull/377.