Raspbian Stretch

[lweberk]

Hi,

just wanted to share our experience of upgrading a core module (M1) from jessie (freshly flashed) to stretch, which is –as of writing– already at RC5, raspbian probably taking a while longer to rebase on it.

Works like a charm. Just change the release in your apt sources files, do a dist-upgrade, and you're good to go. You *should* however make the kunbus sources a higher priority than the raspbian sources. Otherwise there might be the risk of a future upgrade reeling in a kernel coming from raspbian instead of kunbus which ships a patched version. Otherwise it seems –at first glance– safe to rebase user space from stretch on the jessie release kernel and kunbus patches.

That said however, We do recommend against doing this in production before Kunbus gives a green light support-wise. Our case at the moment is pretty simple and we only required never python3 libraries for asyncio. No need for Kunbus software other than hardware support, ethernet. So there is the possibility we are missing issues just because we have not stumbled over them yet.

Happy hacking!
~lweberk

[volker]

well done and thanks for that brilliant report and support to our community!

[lukas]

You *should* however make the kunbus sources a higher priority than the raspbian sources. Otherwise there might be the risk of a future upgrade reeling in a kernel coming from raspbian instead of kunbus which ships a patched version.

Our kernel package has epoch 9 whereas Raspbian has epoch 1 (first number in the version string). This should prevent the kernel from being replaced by a Raspbian one (which lacks piControl.ko + RT patches).

A couple of weeks ago the Foundation has tagged a kernel release based on their 4.9 branch, so apparently they've switched from 4.4 to 4.9. However the latest image available for download (2017-04-10) still contains their 4.4 kernel. I guess they'll release a stretch-based image with a 4.9 kernel in a bit.

[Boris Crismancich]

Hi Volker,

when is the official release of strech for Rev PI 3 planned? Is there a general strategy on when new versions should be supported by rev pi?

Greetings,
Boris

[volker]

Generally said we handle this a little conservative. First of all we need an official Rasbian release because we build on that. Then we start testing and building with our patches and additions to the kernel. This will normally take about 1 to 3 month depending on wether there are issues during tests. Once we have changed the release we do not generally backward support old releases with bug fixes. Some of the fixes may work with older releases others may not but we do not build complete new images for older releases for download purposes.
Hope this makes sense to you...

[matt.s]

Hello,

could you give please give an update on the planned release date for the stretch-based image?

Have a nice day,
matt.s

[matt.s]

Hello,

it would be great if you could tell us at least what is you're planned timeline on upgrading to Raspbian Stretch

Best Regards,
matt.s

[volker]

Next release will be stretch although we will suffer from several odds with it (e.g. VNC is not running as far as we've been informed). Therefore KUNBUS decided to fully support Jessie during Stretch lifetime and maybe also during Buster lifetime. There is a great difference between IT and industry demands. Many industrial customers are not willing to change their OS version every 2 years in a well running system. And yet if the system is connected to the (inter)net they fear security problems when not updating their OS. So they are looking for possibilities of compromises like only doing security related updates. We can't solve this dilemma but we can at least offer a way to stay with a running system and yet get updates for removing bugs we've fixed. So the strategy is to get Debian updates as long as possible and then going on with own updates fixing known bugs of our own sw.
Having explained these details I can tell you that we are planning to release in January with many more interesting new features like RevPi7, and very useful new features of PiCtory.

[matt.s]

Hello,

is there any update on the Stretch release schedule? I hate to be pushy, but the software we want to port to the RevPi has some package dependencies which require Raspbian Stretch or upwards. We've expected the RevPi Stretch image to be released a little bit faster and unfortunately the portation is stuck until there is a new release from Kunbus.

Best Regards,
matt.s

[volker]

Sorry but I need to ask for patience. We got stuck with internal projects too because of this delay. You asked for the schedule and I can only say the schedule was "in January". As you may have realized the schedule is just a schedule and reality is sometimes different... Sorry but I can't tell you any better info on that.