Debian Stretch image?

[thom_nic]

Hi Olimex!  Any chance of building an official SD image from Debian Stretch?  I would love to try it - thanks!

[LubOlimex]

Hey thom_nic

>>> Any chance of building an official SD image from Debian Stretch? 

I don't see us releasing such images anytime soon. There would be official Debian 9 images at some point (like the Jessie images that came after the Wheezy ones) but do not expect them soon. It takes some effort to get the hardware working under a new release and a lot of effort to test everything. The idea behind our official images is to provide customers with a relatively stable and tested environment, that also has support for most of the hardware. We don't aim to provide the newest Debian or the latest kernel, etc.

Best regards,
Lub/OLIMEX

[thom_nic]

Understood - thanks for the reply! 

[vinifr]

Hi,

If you are interested, you can to build your own file system using debootstrap: https://olimex.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/how-to-create-bare-minimum-debian-wheezy-rootfs-from-scratch/

[thom_nic]

Yeah thanks!  I've been going off the Olimex wiki instructions (which are almost identical) and realized building a stretch/sid distro might just be a debootstrap flag change.  I may try playing around with it after I get a stable, repeatable jessie image build.  I'm writing a shell script as I go that basically automates all those steps adds some customization, and spits out an img suitable for `dd`-ing to an SD card.

[thom_nic]

I wanted to follow-up on this since Stretch is now stable: I just took the time to make a branch from the latest 4.9 tag on ti's kernel fork.  Re-applied the Olimex patchset.  I've also updated some defconfig settings (there are some TI wiki docs about musb kconfig and also 8250 serial drivers that they recommend using, which I had enabled on my Jessie/4.4 distro.) 

Rebuilt the kernel and simply changed debootstrap distro from jessie to stretch.  Everything applied and built cleanly and boot looks good.  So initial results are positive. 

One of the nicer benefits of moving to Stretch is the systemd bump to v232.  Jessie ships with systemd 215; especially w/r/t networking, v215 seemed to have some issues.  Also v230 has ipv6 support.  When using Jessie we had to add the jessie-backports repo, do an apt update && apt install -y systemd=230 from chroot because debootstrap can't handle multiple repos of course.  So this simplifies that whole process. 

Also worth noting that stretch-backports carries the 4.12 kernel so that's also probably a good candidate if you want to run a more recent version.

Would hope that since Stretch has been stable for a while and bbb seems to be a regular test target for newer kernel releases maybe Olimex will update their official release soon.  But for anyone wondering, this looks like it will work just fine.  I will update this thread if I encounter any issues.