Good morning all, a few years ago, when ARM was still mostly powering smartphones, I made my employer purchase an ARM64 server for research purposes: a Cavium ThunderX based Gigabyte R120-T35 (mainboard MT30-GS2).
After endless fights and attempts to run kernels newer than the latest Buster one (4.19.0-27) on that machine (all of them ending up with silent or cryptic kernel failures), not being able to upgrade user-space, I had asked for help on the debian-arm64 list, but apparently was too late (or one of too few people who got such a thing at all?). I eventually was reminded of my old but still trusted RasPi 0ws - which had undergone in-place "full-upgrade"s while not upgrading the kernel with the rest of the distro, due to their "special" handling of DTBs etc. by Raspbian. (Raspbian suggest to preform a full install instead of a full upgrade.) In short, even with regular Debian, it should be possible to keep the old (known to run) kernel, put the crucial kernel packages on APT hold (linux-image*, linux-headers-*, linux-libc-dev?, linux-kbuild-*, anything else?) and run an in-place "full-upgrade" (aka "dist-upgrade"), for proof of the concept. Has anyone done this yet and can share ideas? If this "Raspbian-Frankenstein" approach works, how to translate it to a working FAI setup? I guess I'd have to provide a "repository" with the old (but still present in some Debian archives) packages, build a NFSroot using that, and tweak the package_config to keep the versions fixed - again: anything else? Thanks for listening :) any suggestion, link, idea ... is appreciated! - Steffen
