This may be a mile process for a simple question, but I always get nervos messing around with lower-level stuff. I’ve got DietOi 9.4 running on kernel 5.10.160-legacy-rk35xx and I’d love to upgrade to whatever the latest compatible and relatively stable kernel (6.1.xx) in order to take advantage some of the hardware utilization that it allows. I’m running on an Orange Pi 5 Plus.
To be clear everything I currently have has been quite stable and I’m extremely happy with the and DietPi, so if there is a lot of risk of breakage, I’d rather avoid. But if the process is pretty straightforwas, would anyone be able to help out with the upgrade process, inluding the necessary commands and upgrading to the latest stable version of kernel 6.
Okay, thank you. I’ve seen mention of it being possible to switch out kernels in place, but I’ve never done it and would rather not break too much (I don’t mind a little collateral damage that I may have to work through though, as long as it’s possible to do that upgrade ultimately).
Still, you know how to get that itch to scratch to have the latest and greatest, and it sounds like there may be some significant performance improvements in a few key areas.
It currently breaks parts of dietpi-config. Nothing critical, but I want to fix this before doing the migration for all RPi systems and moving the images to our download page. I’ll try to give this some attention for DietPi v9.6.
This has been broken for a while. The only way I know to get the system to be bootable again is to use an earlier image of the /boot partition and reflash it. Or use a /boot partition image from a fresh install.
This might be not working because of diversion stuff not being implemented (not sure).
Hmmm…so is there no way to revert back to my old kernel so I can get this thing to boot in that case? Apologies for my ignorance, but I don’t know much about this low-level stuff.
I do have a copy of the old hard drive dumped with dietpi-backup on an external drive. Although, the drive is encrypted, so I’d need to find a way to mount it somewhere to copy old stuff off of it.
Assuming I could do that and get files from the old boot partition, how would I flash a new image and then copy all of that back on there so it would be bootable?
I don’t know much either, that’s why my method might not be ideal.
You can probably revert to the old kernel by making and initializing a new dietpi SD card and copying the /boot partition over the “broken” one - I had a backup image. You need to give it the same UUID. All of this can be done using gparted.
I’m not sure if just copying the files will work, but it would be easier of course.
There’s also a way to use chroot to your old install and install that package from an external system but I’m not the one to ask how.
On Orange Pi 5 Plus in general? It worked fine when I tested on mine a few weeks ago . So another reason to not migrate to vendor kernel yet.
@adamb
It can be easily reverted when you have another Linux system, since the legacy kernel package is still installed. Mount the drive, check the /boot partition, there are 3 symlinks: Image, dtb and uInitrd, which are pointing to the 6.1 Linux image, device tree dir and initramfs image. Just re-create them to point to the 5.10 variants again.
Okay, thank you for that. GOod to know for future reference. Unfortunately, it won’t help much in my case as my root and boot partitions are on the eMMC drive on the Orange Pi itself and thus can’t be easily accessed directly on another machine.
I suppose I could try making the necessary symlinks by booting off of an SD card and accessing the drive in that way, but I feel as though I’m walking on thin ice with this kinds of stuff.
Thank you for you suggestions, though. If I were to do a fresh install of the OS on the eMMC drive and wanted to test out one of Joshua Reik’s images, would I then be able to “convert” the system to dietpi in order to have access to all of you nice tools and such once the system is back up and running.
Or, would you just recommend I do a fresh install of dietpi itself from scratch?
Don’t you have an eMMC-USB adapter to attach it elsewhere?
Even easier, yes exactly that way then, just flash a fresh DietPi image to an SD card and boot from that one to mount the eMMC and adjust the symlinks.
“rk35xx” is not a version but a kernel family. legacy-rk35xx is the currently well functional, but old Linux 5.10.160 from Rockchip sources. vendor-rk35xx is the newer Linux 6.1 from Rockchip sources, which obviously still has issues. It was added just 3 months ago, hence whatever you tried to install a year ago, it was not this kernel branch or version : rk35xx/rockchip-rk3588: vendor: the unthinkable! add `vendor` branch … · armbian/build@ddcd68d · GitHub
Okay, thank you for checking on that. Yeah, probably my luck that a write got corrupted or something. Admittedly, I don’t have the machine secured well in like a rack or anything, it’s just sitting on end table shelf and thus is subject to bangs on occasion. well, I guess these are always opportunities to learn something. Those symlinks that need to be switched out are all on the boot filesystem then?
If I wanted to manually install and update a kernel image, would be as simple as coping the image files to a folder on the boot partition and then pointing those symlinks to those files? Or is it more involved than that?
. So another reason to not migrate to vendor kernel yet.
: