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Release Notes

October 2023 (version 8.23)

Overview

The October 21th, 2023 release of DietPi v8.23 comes with hardware related enhancements (Raspberry Pi, ROCK5B, ROCK 4, VisionFive 2) and a couple of improvements and bug fixes.

Chair and leaves

Photo by JillWellington, Pixabay

Enhancements

  • Raspberry Pi On Debian Bookworm and above, the RPi APT repository will be migrated to its new Bookworm suite. This solves issues and should enhance performance with FFmpeg, Kodi and some other A/V software, where we used the Debian packages with less hardware support before. The packages should be upgraded automatically on DietPi update. Please report back if you experience any issues during this process.
  • ROCK 5B Added an option to dietpi-config “Advanced Option” to flash the SPI bootloader, which enables USB and NVMe boot for DietPi images.
  • ROCK 4 Added an option to dietpi-config “Advanced Option” to flash the SPI bootloader, which enables USB and in case NVMe boot for DietPi images. Note that not all ROCK 4 models ship with an onboard SPI storage. DietPi-Config will check for it, in case apply a related device tree overlay and suggests a reboot. If after the reboot an SPI device has still not been found, your board seems to have none. Report back if this is definitely wrong. Many thanks to @andreagdipaolo for doing this request: MichaIng/DietPi#6688
  • VisionFive 2 A major kernel upgrade to Linux 6.1 will be applied, including the needed configuration files to read and write the U-Boot environment, and a generic default environment. This allows booting from all filesystems of all partitions of all storage media, including NVMe SSDs, USB, eMMC, SD cards and DHCP/TFTP. This was necessary since the default environment of the latest StarFive U-Boot release does not support booting from any other then FAT filesystems on partition 3 anymore. It is hence necessary to apply our default environment before updating the SPI bootloader. After the DietPi update and a reboot, run fw_setenv to do that. Afterwards you can use this command and fw_printenv to edit the environment, including the boot_targets variable to define boot targets and priorities. Additionally this release will apply device tree overlays to enable 8 GB RAM and A revision Ethernet support. As this is a major change, we recommend a dietpi-backup or even an image backup. We are happy for any feedback: MichaIng/DietPi#6212
  • DietPi-Software | Firefox Enabled the software option for RISC-V, since Debian provides packages now. But do not expect good performance, as GPU-acceleration is missing.
  • DietPi-Software | ADS-B Feeder The uninstall has been hardened to rule out the removal of unused Docker images which were not created by ADS-B Feeder. Furthermore, beta tags are now correctly shown in the version string. Many thanks to @andreagdipaolo for reporting a related issue and @dirkhh for implementing the enhancement: https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/pull/6587#issuecomment-1743744008
  • DietPi-Software | DietPi-Dashboard Experimental support for RISC-V has been added. Note that this will be an alpha build with alpha versions of certain dependencies, required to compile on RISC-V. Hence this is not suitable for production usage, which basically applies for RISC-V and the VisionFive 2 in general.

Bug fixes

As always, many smaller code performance and stability improvements, visual and spelling fixes have been done, too much to list all of them here. Check out all code changes of this release on GitHub: MichaIng/DietPi!6693