Warning: Debian stable kernel upgrade breaks most ARM SBC • Hacker News Board

Re: Warning: Debian stable kernel upgrade breaks most ARM SBC

#41

Post by markvdb » Mon, Feb 18, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #25

markvdb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do at https://fosdem.org on our custom made video gear. That's 56 boxes in a crucial spot in our operation. We went out of our way to make sure we had plain vanilla mainline Debian stable packaged linux running on the Allwinner A20 based boards that power them, instead of some binary arm kernel with all kinds of issues.

Off-topic, but Fosdem is great! Started going about 6ish years ago and always enjoy it! Thanks for the hard work and for providing such a great event for free. And for the cool t-shirts :D

Thank you for the kind words. Much appreciated!

Re: Warning: Debian stable kernel upgrade breaks most ARM SBC

#42

Post by yebyen » Mon, Feb 18, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

ncr100 wrote: post #40

yebyen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually 100% true. Stable is the culmination of the Debian Release Engineering / Testing Freeze process. In Unstable, packages are promoted from Experimental as I understand it which is a comparatively easy threshold to get past. In Testing, packages are only promoted from Unstable if they 1) don't have any bugs open against them, and 2) there is not a freeze on. 50% of the time (1 year) there is a freeze on…

Misleading label to say, e.g. "The horse is unstable." when intending to explain how the horse is outside the stable. (re: Stable == Compound in Debian-speak.)

Hmm, I meant stable compound in the sense of a noble gas, not highly volatile or reactive. Or say, lower energy states that are not as likely to emit a photon.

The horse is "unstable'd", maybe another way of saying it. Unstable is developed outside of the stable release engineering process. That does not mean it's without safeguards. The unstable releases tend to be very stable. There are extra safeguards, and time-based safety measures that protect users of the Stable distribution. They say that Unstable might take longer to get fixes, and while that's likely true in the case of critical fixes with special attention, it's almost never true in practice other than that. Unstable receives fixes much more quickly, in general.

There actually used to be a "debian-volatile" project, too, for things like virus definitions that should be used in a stable distribution, and also didn't make sense to govern through the stable release process, but it is defunct now.

Re: Warning: Debian stable kernel upgrade breaks most ARM SBC

#43

Post by geppetto » Tue, Feb 19, 2019, 9:06 AM UTC

kfwhp wrote: post #4

sm4rk0 wrote: post #2

This should be made "sticky", if there was this feature @HN. Strange that ci.debian.net didn't catch this.

What % of HN users use an ARM SBC with Debian?

I'm glad I can. It's a known, trusted distribution I've been using since 2001 on my main PC. It runs my personal web server since 2013 on a Cuibeboard and it works well. I've got a stable system which I'm familiar with, plus automatic updates, no binary blobs, vanilla kernel and all.

I can't think of a better solution if the SBC is supported. What would you recommend as an alternative?