Changelog and upgrades - when and why to upgrade - HardKernel HC2

[jl_678]

Hi,

 

I am running Armbian on four HardKernel HC2's and everything is working perfectly.  The four SBC's are running a Moosefs cluster running Ubuntu 18.04 and Armbian 5.85, and this leads to my questions:

 

1. I am trying to decide whether to upgrade as apt is proposing moving to 5.89  The change log does not currently list 5.89 and shows 5.87 as the newest. Am I missing something?
2. When I look at previous change logs it is difficult to decipher which fixes impact the HC2/HC1/XU4.  Is there an easy way to tell?
3. How do you decide when to upgrade?
4. Is it even worth upgrading when running more mature boards like this one? My boards run inside a private network behind a firewall, and my #1 priority is stability and reliability.

 

Thank you.

Edited July 1, 2019 by jl_678

[Igor]

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/10767-updated-kernels-for-odroid-xu4/

 

It's a small upgrade which align with Hardkernel's and upstream changes which are mainly some minor bug fixes only.
Extracting, testing each change and writing this to a special file is too time consuming and tell little. Peek the logs if you see anything that is important to your use case:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/log/?h=v4.4.184

https://github.com/hardkernel/linux/commits/odroidn2-4.9.y

+ our changes with updates to some wifi if relevant:
 

- added wireless drivers for 88x2bu

- updated wireless drivers for Realtek 8811, 8812, 8814 and 8821

- updated wireless drivers for rtl8188eus & rtl8188eu & rtl8188etv

- added latest Wireguard driver 

 

It was tested for booting, so it should be safe to upgrade ... in case something is odd, you can still revert and use older kernels, perhaps freeze them and update packages only. Very unlikely that you will need this - support for XU4/HC is matured.

 

 

[jl_678]

Thank you!