Upgraded to latest Armbian, but stuck on old kernel

[Johannes]

Hi all,

 

First post here. I have been running Armbian on my original Bananapi Pro for a long while now, and thought that it's time to upgrade from Bullseye to Bookworm finally. There were some complications with UsrMerge that I had to resolve manually (I think some boot files from the original Buster installation were both in /lib and /usr/lib), but apart from that the upgrade appears to have worked: All userspace stuff is on Bookworm.

 

# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Armbian 24.5.0-trunk.530 bookworm
Release:        12
Codename:       bookworm

 

However, the kernel seems to be stuck on 5.15:

 

# uname -a
Linux bananapi 5.15.43-sunxi #22.05.1 SMP Sat May 28 08:17:47 UTC 2022 armv7l GNU/Linux

 

This version number appears to be inconsistent with the contents of armbian-image-release:

 

# cat /etc/armbian-image-release
# PLEASE DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE
BOARD=bananapipro
BOARD_NAME="Banana Pi Pro"
BOARDFAMILY=sun7i
BUILD_REPOSITORY_URL=https://github.com/armbian/build
BUILD_REPOSITORY_COMMIT=85080ff3
VERSION=5.99.191113
LINUXFAMILY=sunxi
BRANCH=dev
ARCH=arm
IMAGE_TYPE=nightly
BOARD_TYPE=eos
INITRD_ARCH=arm
KERNEL_IMAGE_TYPE=zImage
IMAGE_UUID=1b7fd79e-803f-4438-8b4c-5e9287a7b86c

 

I saw on the download page that a current download of Armbian Bookwork for the Bananapi Pro would include Kernel 6.6.29, so there should be a newer kernel available.

 

Can you help me troubleshooting what is holding my system back from upgrading to a newer kernel? Various posts on the forum suggest anything from "apt-get upgrade will update your kernel" to "use armbian-config". Using the latter, I tried switch between nightly and stable, which didn't offer any updated kernel to apt. The "Switch to other kernels" option retrieves some files, then shows the "Yes, I understand" screen but then immediately goes back to the main "System settings" screen, which makes me think that something is broken here. How can I find out what exactly is broken?

Edited May 3 by Johannes

[SteeMan]

Looks like you have the vendor kernel package installed.  If you want mainline kernel, then you need to install the current kernel package.  Run armbian-config and see what it tells you are the available kernels for you. Now realize that going from vendor to mainline kernel you might loose some functionality (there is an FAQ item on this), but you can always switch back to vendor kernel if it is important.

[Johannes]

Thank you for your reply. I suppose you mean the "Switch to other kernels" option? As said, it doesn't seem to be working, and I think I have a hunch now why that might be the case: Running "dpkg -l | grep linux-image", the output is completely empty. Or is this option looking for something completely different?

[SteeMan]

What are the contents of your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list?

I have seen it happen that the upgrade will prompt you to delete obsolete packages and will consider the armbian packages obsolete and remove your kernel (which obviously is a problem)

[Johannes]

deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/armbian.gpg] http://apt.armbian.com bookworm main bookworm-utils bookworm-desktop

 

I added the signing key as per this thread:

 

[SteeMan]

That looks correct for your current situation.

What is the contents of your /boot directory?

And the output from :   apt list --installed | grep linux

and

apt list --installed | grep armbian

(I.m used to using the apt command instead of the dpkg command)

[Johannes]

I think you were dead-on in your previous post - the armbian-bsp-cli-bananapipro package was not installed anymore. After installing that, the "Switch to other kernels" option started working again, and I have a choice of three kernels now! But before I proceed and install the new kernel - I noticed that the linux-u-boot-bananapipro-current package is also not installed. I'm not sure how critical that is, and if just installing the new kernel would be enough. Should I install it manually before proceeding?

Edited May 3 by Johannes

[SteeMan]

Installing the uboot package shouldn't have any impact.  In fact from my understanding installing the package just downloads the files.  You need to run armbian-config to actually install the uboot files.

[Johannes]

Thanks for the confirmation. I ran the kernel update via armbian-config and everything worked without issues. Thanks again!

Edited May 3 by Johannes