Rock5B Radxa Debian 12 image question: OK to install u-boot-rk2410 and remove u-boot-rknext?

#1

Doing “aptitude upgrade” inside the https://github.com/radxa-build/rock-5b/releases/download/rsdk-b5/rock-5b_bookworm_kde_b5.output.img.xz image leads to:

# aptitude upgrade
Resolving dependencies...
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}
The following packages will be upgraded:
codium firefox-esr linux-libc-dev task-rockchip-gstreamer u-boot-rock-5b
5 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 downgraded, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 172 MB of archives. After unpacking 30.3 MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

Can you just quickly please confirm that the device will not be rendered unbootable by the removal of u-boot-rknext and the installation of u-boot-rk2410?

I’m not sure why these packages installation/removal were not made at the packaging time. I guess Radxa updated their packaging inside https://radxa-repo.github.io/bookworm etc. last days, causing this change.

@RadxaYuntian

#2

Please only use rsetup to update the system, as otherwise you might get an unbootable system (but not from U-Boot update).

We are maintaining our system as a rolling release distro. This is unavoidable when you keep having new products to support and new SDK to update to, so you never can stop at some stable version and say no more breaking changes from now on. With apt upgrade, it won’t remove packages for this operation, which would result in partial upgrade and broken system. This is why you cannot use this command.

u-boot-* packages can be installed freely. They don’t modify the installed bootloader when package is installed, since there is no good way to tell where the bootloader is actually installed. Like you said, there is also the potential to break the system, so they are designed to NOT modify the system when installed (even if say we can figure out where to install them). User must explicitly install them from rsetup.

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On Rock5B with Radxa's Debian image, it's always safe to do "apt update; apt upgrade", right?
#3

@radxaYuntian Which package in your Debian distribution are you saying that it would be a problem if it was not removed?

It is not at all good that you break normal Debian commands like “apt upgrade” without disabling those commands.

When people treat this Debian like a normal Debian, and that leads to that the installation breaks and you essentially need to spend a full day reinstalling the device, that is a problem. Competent people who use the device and don’t know of these specifics will break devices quickly.

Therefore “apt upgrade” should fail with an error message e.g. “This is a custom Radxa Debian distribution, please choose System update in the rsetup tool.”.

#4

In this case we are similar to Proxmox VE where apt upgrade should also not be used on their system, and on their system it is not disabled.

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