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Comment by kfwhp | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

OffTopic: At FOSDEM, I was quite curious about those media boxes. Is there any docs to read about them?

Here's some info at least:

* a rough diagram: https://github.com/FOSDEM/video/tree/master/hardware

* the software running on them: https://github.com/FOSDEM/infrastructure/tree/master/ansible...

Your message also served as a reminder that I should really publish the laser cut box cutting and assembly info. I'll get to that eventually.

Was your fleet impacted by this?

Edit: oh, FOSDEM was 2 weeks ago, not in the near future, so impact is less

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!

I'm sure it's small, but at least a few of us are here. Also worth noting is that (most) Raspberry Pi (an ARM SBC) users are indirectly Debian users too. (and I'm a Pi user as well)

There's just about zero chance that this bug would make it into raspbian stable, though, since they are always at least several months behind debian-stable on AMD64.

And you'd really hope they'd actually test it on real hardware. Although I don't know if they have anything automated, that'd be interesting to know.

My BeagleBone Black runs a Debian-based distro (Angstrom), and there are spins based on Debian proper, Ubuntu, etc. So it’s definitely good to know.

Ångström appears to be based on OpenEmbedded rather than Debian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85ngstr%C3%B6m_distributio...

The BBB doesn't use an upstream kernel though as far as I can tell.

I have 10 Raspberry Pi's with Debian Stretch and Jessie - the Raspbian variant. I updated a "sacrificial" Pi and rebooted without error.. this time!

  Package: linux-libc-dev
  Version: 4.9.82-1+deb9u3+rpi1
  Priority: optional
  Section: devel
  Source: linux-4.9
  Maintainer: Debian Kernel Team <debian-kernel@lists.debian.org>
  Installed-Size: 4,466 kB
  Provides: linux-kernel-headers
  Homepage: https://www.kernel.org/
  Download-Size: 1,300 kB
  APT-Manual-Installed: no
  APT-Sources: http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian stretch/main
  armhf Packages Description: Linux support headers for userspace
  development This package provides userspaces headers from the Linux
  kernel.  These headers are used by the installed headers for GNU libc
  and other system libraries.

edit: formatting

As others have mentioned, Raspbian kernel updates are delayed behind the Debian ones. The linked bug report states it was introduced between 4.9.135-1 and 4.9.144-1 (of linux-image-4.9.0).

I use 2 Olimex A20 Micro with Debian stable as personal servers (Web, Email, Backup). One of them had already installed the toxic update via unattended-upgrades. Fortunately I did not configure automatic reboot. So I had the chance to read about the issue here on Hacker News and reinstall the old version:

$ wget https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20181028T150508Z/...

$ dpkg -i linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae_4.9.130-2_armhf.deb

and set the version on hold:

$ apt-mark hold linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae

I do, but I'm OK with being a statistical fluke.

I imagine there could be a number of IOT, media or other devices unknowingly running Debian on ARM though; more than we realise.

Not Debian directly but one of their derivative: Armbian, they have great support for Allwinner SoC and it's easy to build your own image.

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?

I do, at least for some personal projects. They're more than capable enough for many tasks, and cheap enough to be willing to just grab another if you have a quick task.

I don't run Debian, but I have multiple ARM SBCs that I work with as well.

I have a Rock64 NAS box running an RK3328 chip.

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