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Pi 3 A+ Raspbian compatibility

wezzoid

Hi, I just received 2 lovely Pi 3 A+ boards from Farnell this morning, but I'm having a little trouble.

 

I have workhorse SD with 2018-06-27-raspbian-stretch on it that I happily move between my CM3 board, 3B, 3B+ and two Zero W's without issue.

 

On the 3A+ it gets stuck at the rainbow screen.

 

I see that the newest version of Stretch includes 3A+ compatibility in the release notes.

 

I've got a bunch of tools on my image (ROS etc) that would take a day or more to rebuild and set up. Rather than do that, is there a change I can make to my existing image that will make the new board happy and still work with the old ones? What, exactly was done to make Stretch 3A+ compatible?

  • This sort of stuff is related to the firmware. The firmware boots the GPU configures various things and then boots the ARM CPU. Getting things wrong here results in a hang or crash. New hardware sometimes requires a few minor tweaks for things to work.

     

    So... Put the card in a working pi and try

      sudo apt update

      sudo apt dist-upgrade

     

    to see if that helps. If it does not, try

      sudo rpi-update

    This should get the latest firmware stuff. But it has the disadvantage of pulling the kernel and boot images away from the APT package manager, so you might miss out on future updates if you continue using only apt. So that's why I suggest you try the apt route first.

     

    Good luck, and I'd appreciate it hearing from you if it worked. (and what worked).  :-)

  • in reply to rew

    Thanks for the quick reply!

     

      sudo apt update

      sudo apt dist-upgrade

     

    fixed it. Well that was embarrassingly easy! The old Stretch works on the new Pi, and still works on the old ones, AFAIK so far anyway. Thankyou.

  • in reply to wezzoid

    I’m glad it worked out for Wes.  I just want to warn others who might read this.  The distribution upgrade

    ( sudo apt dist-upgrade ) is a BIG download.  Be sure you have enough space before entering the command.  I learned the hard way.  Now I always do a $ df -h first, so that I’m sure how much space I really have.

     

    I made the mistake with an 8 GB card.  It filled up and the rPi locked up.  I had to re-image the card.  But, if you have a 16 or 32 GB card, it shouldn’t be a problem

  • in reply to mp2100

    If you're short on space and you've been apt-get installing all the time, do an apt-get clean to remove cached packages. You can also do apt-get autoremove as sometimes, unneeded orphan packages remain after a dist-upgrade to give you just a little more space.

     

    - Gough

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    Marked as helpful because I thought about that but didn't take the time to type it out.


    FYI, autoremove also removes packages that were installed as dependencies for packages you no longer have. So if, for example, you install a SUDOKU game to try it out, decide you don't like the interface, so you remove it again. But the libraries that were installed just-for-sudoku are nolonger needed and can be removed. Autoremove does that.

     

    Another case is with the Linux kernels. Just upgrading the kernel would overwrite the kernel used in the boot process something going wrong there (powerfail, a bad change that causes your computer to hang) would make your computer unbootable. So therefore each new kernel is a new package. If you update often you'll get a long string of old kernels that you'll never use again. autoremove also removes those. (staying away from the one currently running and the most recent one).