Bookworm upgrade availability soon ?

[olimex]

Thanks for your feedback! We always appreciate it.
Moving to Bookworm and latest kernel is of course something we also want bad but there are lot of obstracles to do it. Not everything is supported in upstream kernel and as A64 is already considered as "old" SOC probably no one is / will be working on this, and this is far behind our own capabilities.

I asked one of our Linux developers about your security updates concern and this is what he answered: Bullseye is still in the support up to August 2026 and ELTS probably will extend it to 2031.

[jch]

> as A64 is already considered as "old" SOC probably no one is / will be working on this

In that case, what's the suggested replacement for the Olinuxino-A64?

[ilario]

> as A64 is already considered as "old" SOC probably no one is / will be working on this

In that case, what's the suggested replacement for the Olinuxino-A64?

No answer, so seems that so far (2025-05-27) there is no suggested replacement.

I just realized the existence of the System-on-Module (SOM) products line, and you could consider trying those products instead. The newest being iMX8MP-SOM-4GB-IND + iMX8MP-SOM-EVB-IND combination (and maybe including also Flash-e32Gs16M but check out this topic https://www.olimex.com/forum/index.php?topic=9808.0).

Not as convenient as a Single Board Computer, as it does not have a nice box, but it looks like a viable option to me.

[mossroy]

Not everything is supported in upstream kernel and as A64 is already considered as "old" SOC probably no one is / will be working on this, and this is far behind our own capabilities.

@Olimex: does that mean that Olimex will not ever publish any bookworm image?

I asked one of our Linux developers about your security updates concern and this is what he answered: Bullseye is still in the support up to August 2026 and ELTS probably will extend it to 2031.

That's true for packages of Debian repositories. However, the kernel used by Olinuxino devices is not the one from Debian repos, but the one from Olimex repo.
As I wrote here 7 months ago, the current version of this kernel (5.10.180-olimex) is completely outdated, and full of CVEs.

In any case, I suppose what you wrote means that the Olinuxino-A64 devices will become completely obsolete (in terms of security) with the end of LTS support of Debian Bullseye. This is one year from now: end of June 2026, based on https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Bullseye

I know about ELTS, but it's a commercial offer: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended. And it's not clear if they will support arm64 architecture or not. In any case, it's not cheap at all: https://www.freexian.com/lts/extended/docs/cost-estimation/ . Will Olimex pay that for its customers? I doubt so.

I remind what you wrote 2 years ago (at the beginning of this thread) about bookworm upgrade:

We plan to upgrade but we don't have a timeline. As soon as we test how it works and apply all fixes needed. Bookworm was released 4 days ago...

Since mainline kernel seems to work on some variants of Olinuxino-A64 (like LIME2, as reported by someone else above), would there be at least a way to make mainline Debian Bookworm work on all variants (without kernel panic), even if it would be with minimal support?
Maybe by making it ignore some hardware features if necessary (like eMMC). Even by doing some soldering on our side, if there's no other choice.

Please help us with a way to avoid trashing working devices, only because of obsolete software.