On Rock5B with Radxa's Debian image, it's always safe to do "apt update; apt upgrade", right?

#1

Hi,

The latest stable Debian distributed for Rock5B by Radxa is this Bookworm image: https://github.com/radxa-build/rock-5b/releases/download/rsdk-b5/rock-5b_bookworm_kde_b5.output.img.xz

For clarity, doing “apt update; apt upgrade” is ALWAYS safe, right?

I would not want to take the risk that Debian had released a new kernel or u-boot version, and that version turns out to now have the RK3588 Rock5B specific patches, etc.

Inside https://docs.radxa.com/en/rock5/rock5b/radxa-os/using-apt I see a command under “Please run the following command to add the RadxaOS Vendor repository:”, it says “VENDOR… deb…”, and then “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade --allow-downgrades task-rockchip; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade --allow-downgrades”.

But, on the downloaded Debian image above these steps are already done so I don’t need to do them, right, or?

It would be a shame if a Rock5B suddenly is rendered unbootable and a whole system reinstall would be needed.

Right now I noticed apt upgrade shows this: “update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.1.84-6-rk2410”, so kernel upgrades do happen.

The next line was “Couldn’t find EFI system partition. It is recommended to mount it to /boot or /efi.”.

It also said “Unpacking u-boot-rk2410 (2017.09-45-b9a0522) …”, not sure of what consequence that is.

Also interestingly “aptitude upgrade” started with this:

# aptitude upgrade
The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-good
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  u-boot-rk2410{a}
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  u-boot-rknext{u}

This is all correct and you always test the Debian updates before they become reachable via apt update; apt upgrade, right?

Thanks

@RadxaYuntian @jack

Oh, I see Yuntian followed up here Rock5B Radxa Debian 12 image question: OK to install u-boot-rk2410 and remove u-boot-rknext? and said apt update; apt upgrade is NOT safe.

And refered here https://docs.radxa.com/en/template/sbc/os-config/rsetup#system-update .

Apparently rsetup has a Debian update function in it now, which is safe and is the designated way to update a Rock5B.

@radxaYuntian In which situations does it actually matter to use rsetup , i.e. what kind of situations does apt update; apt upgrade get into so it breaks the Debian installation and makes it unbootable? E.g. does it install broken kernels, or break u-boot etc.?

Rock-3a nvme second boot problem
#2

The primary mechanism of how apt upgrade breaks the system was explained in the linked reply already: it doesn’t remove packages which results in partial upgrade. Whether that will actually break the system depends on what packages was actually installed before it, so the older the image is the more likely it will be broken by it.

The breakage is almost never caused by broken kernels, since we usually catch that in the testing so it won’t be released to production channel (we have separate package repositories for this). U-Boot packages won’t modify the installed bootloader automatically. It is more like a resource/add-on package, where rsetup uses to update the bootloader with user confirmation. The breakage is usually caused by broken system configurations or or mismatched packages, which is why the potential issue was listed with a list of system anomalies.

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