Rock Pi 4C Kernel Upgrade

#1

Hello Community,

I’m in the process of running a Kubernetes cluster across my Rock Pi 4C cluster and I’m deciding on running the Cilium CNI with eBPF, however it requires I’m running at least 5.x kernel, I’m using the Rock Pi ARM64 Ubuntu Focal 20.04 image however it’s pinned to 4.4 and I can’t see Rock Pi packages for the more recent kernel versions

My questions are the following:

  1. Should I compile the kernel upgrades myself? If yes, are there any docs I can follow?
  2. Is using a fresh Ubuntu ARM64 20.04.2 image that comes packaged with 5.x kernel a better option? If yes, do I need to load any custom Rock Pi firmware to be able to boot?

I appreciate everyone’s comments and thoughts!!

#2

Most of the problems are gone by using https://www.armbian.com/ where you can use ready made kernel 5.10.y Debian/Ubuntu derived images or build latest kernel with a help of this tool https://github.com/armbian/build

Remember that hardware specific support in modern kernels is not yet on the level of legacy. And it will probably not be anytime soon. This means things like cameras, displays, multimedia … is not on the same level. But I guess for your use case not relevant. Grab Armbian. Its also generally better than Ubuntu.