After happily using my helios64 with armbian buster for years I finally dared to upgrade and everything went smoothly.

 

I found instructions somewhere here in this forum and this is what I did.

 

I first commented out /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list

 

Then I upgraded to bullseye by replacing everything buster with bullseye in /etc/apt/sources.list (I think I also had to change the url to the security repo)

 

Then I did

 

apt-get update && apt full-upgrade

 

and rebooted.

 

Great success!

 

Then the same for bookworm and again great success.

 

Then reenabled the armbian apt repo with bookworm. again full-upgrade, reboot and again great success.

 

Now I have kernel 6.1.50-current-rockchip64

 

Now the thing I don't understand:

 

When I ssh to the machine it still lists buster and /etc/armbian-release is untouched. I checked a bit and /etc/armbian-release is part of linux-buster-root-current-helios64 on my system which sounds suspicious. The package seems to contain super integral parts of the system. udev rules, systemd rules etcpp. and is still installed. I don't see an obvious replacement for it.

 

Can somebody shed some light on it? What did I miss?

 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, m0ppers said:

Now I have kernel 6.1.50-current-rockchip64

 

Did you realize that none of your USB Ports are accessible anymore (dwc3 usb regression) ? This is the topic of the parallel thread.

 

There are many things that can go wrong if you try userspace upgrades. You should set up your system starting from Armbian 23.05 - 6.1.36 image (bookworm).

hm. not sure I get it. do you mean that upgrading armbian is completely unsupported and that I should always do a fresh reinstall?

it was non trivial to set everything up as it is now. I have everything encrypted including the root filesystem installed on eMMC, proper harddisk configuration with spindows etc. and quite a bit of software installed and configured. reinstall would be a serious pain.

 

If USB is not working I don't really care. I run it as a NAS in another room. unless I reboot (and have to specify my crypt password) I never attach a keyboard. suprisingly entering the password works during boot 🤔