RPi5 Armbian_25.2.x upgrade: Unsupported initramfs version

[ChrisO]

Hi

Installed Armbian_25.2.3_Rpi4b_bookworm_current_6.12.17-homeassistant_minimal.img

To work around broken packages dependency run:
apt update
dpkg --remove --force-all libraspberrypi0 armbian-bsp-cli-rpi4b-current
apt --fix-broken install

At the end I got this:
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.12.17-current-bcm2711
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8156b-2.fw for built-in driver r8152
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8156a-2.fw for built-in driver r8152
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8153c-1.fw for built-in driver r8152
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8153b-2.fw for built-in driver r8152
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8153a-4.fw for built-in driver r8152
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8153a-3.fw for built-in driver r8152
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8153a-2.fw for built-in driver r8152
ERROR: Unsupported initramfs version (6.12.17-current-bcm2711)

 

Armbian_25.2.4_Rpi4b_bookworm_current_6.12.22_minimal.img the same.

Any idea anyone what is wrong here?

Thanks
Chris

Edited Tuesday at 09:18 PM by ChrisO
edit

[Werner]

13 hours ago, ChrisO said:

ERROR: Unsupported initramfs version (6.12.17-current-bcm2711)

I've seen this error before. I think that's some incompatibility from rpi own packages that have some regex checking if its their own kernel or not. Did not get any further though.

[eselarm]

This reminds me of old issue on rpi forum, back to Debian10 times more or less when RPL did not support initramfs and I have been using Btrfs for RPis since Buster (or for sure Bullseye) timeframe.

 

I loop mounted Armbian rolling rpi4 trixie image and ran it via systemd-nspawn -b -D <mountpoint>

 

Then it turns out what I thought: the installed firmware package includes the script same as on Raspberry Pi OS from RPL themselves to copy/rename standard Debian kernel+modules install patch to the FAT boot partition.

root@localhost:~# apt list | grep raspi
raspi-config/trixie,trixie,now 20221214-0ubuntu1 all [installed]
raspi-firmware/trixie,trixie,now 1:1.20250430-1 all [installed]
raspi-gpio/trixie 0.20231127 arm64
raspi-utils/trixie,trixie 20250314-1 all
root@localhost:~# dpkg -L raspi-firmware | grep z50
/etc/initramfs/post-update.d/z50-raspi-firmware
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/z50-raspi-firmware
/etc/kernel/postrm.d/z50-raspi-firmware

And it is this part of z50-raspi-firmware

flavour="$(echo "$initrd_version" | rev | cut -f1 -d- | rev)"
case $flavour in
  v6|v7|v7l|v8|2712)
    ;;
  *)
    echo "ERROR: Unsupported initramfs version ($initrd_version)"
    exit 0
    ;;
esac

On 1 of my RPi4 I had also the standard Debian kernel 'linux-image-arm64' besides the RPi kernel 'linux-image-rpi-v8' and grub-efi. So when the bootFAT parttition is tagged 0xEF00 (ESP) I could run the image/SD-card unmodified in virt-manager selecting the vanilla Debian kernel in GRUB.

 

I have thought a lot about what to do with those hook scripts in /etc/initramfs, also created various own ones, for Raspberry Pi OS and Raspbian and Armbian. The latter as it is U-Boot (on Rockchip/Allwinner) but just recently I put EDK2-UEFI v1.1 in SPI-flash and that makes all the efforts void as I now use default grub to load Armbian (and Opensuse) on RK3588. For RPi (3, 4, 5) this won't work unless some intermediate efi binary loader is used like is done in Opensuse, for Fedora maybe as well, I don't know. Still this won't work for RPi5 (yet) as its RP1 chip is a bottleneck for upstream support (complex PCI-E DeviceTree handling, see patches efforts done by Suse people AFAIR).

 

With introduction of Bookworm, the RPi firmware can load standard names for initramfs for all RPi HW variants back till 2012. But still no way to select a specific kernel adhoc at boot time via serial console for example (like extlinux.conf for U-Boot). The U-Boot v.s. RPI-firmwarebootloader feels a bit like UNIX pathnames v.s. MS-DOS pathnames, e.g. "/tmp" v.s. "C:\TEMP" or "Image" v.s. "kernel8.img" or "uInitrd" v.s. "initramfs8".

 

Maybe the option is to patch z50-raspi-firmware, maybe remove it from the .deb package. But also it is just a warning, so who cares one could think.

 

Other option is to use the vanilla Debian variant of raspi-firmware

root@localhost:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# apt list -a raspi-firmware
raspi-firmware/trixie,trixie,now 1:1.20250430-1 all [installed]
raspi-firmware/testing 1.20240424+ds-6 all

That older version has other script implementation (very different), also uses upstream_kernel=1 in config.txt, which selects other firmware DTB names for Pi3.

 

Now writing this, I think 'vendor' could be downstream RPL based, so new firmware package and 'current' and 'edge' could be upstream mainline. But that also would mean almost no RPi5 functionality as long as that RP1 I/O chip functionality is not upstreamed. I don't know what status is, latest I know is that the wired ethernet still does not work, workaround is to use a RJ45 USB2 dongle on the USB-C connector.