I am glad you got it to work like this, I see so many topics on this forum from people who start from scratch and then have all kinds of issues because their old installation is wiped and Bookworm has other default settings and so on so they get stuck.
If you do the normal Debian apt dist-upgrade, you get all sorts of info while upgrading and your own/special software usually keeps running without any changes. So I noticed that you had already done successfully the dist-upgrade. It is then only this radical change in kernel and firmware packages and that is specific to how a Pi and also almost every other SBC boots. The old Bullseye method breaks Debian Linux initramfs flow actually. Lots of troubles with that.
I did use Pis in the past assuming they booted the same way as PC with BIOS, so reading some first sector form the SD-card or so. For backups I just copied the first 100MB of the SD-card into a file on my NAS, same as for PCs. But I think around when the P3B+ came on the market, I saw the Broadcom SoC can simply understand and read FAT filesystems, so then I searched a bit like: https://www.google.com/search?q=raspber ... +explained
From there, you can see what files are needed on the FAT partition. In RPiOS Bookworm, it is like Ubuntu and Opensuse did already earlier: they keep a normal compatible Linux rootfs and copy just the firmware and kernel and/or bootmanager to the FAT (bootpartition or bootfs). It is handled by script: /etc/initramfs/post-update.d/z50-raspi-firmware
This script had flaws at release time almost a year ago, but now seems to work correctly even when you have own or non-RPi kernels in /boot
So it is just a matter of several years getting Windows PC's dual-boot with Linux and booting Android phones with own 'custom ROM' and booting non-RPI SBCs with Linux that learned me that the Pis are easy to get booted as you can take out the SD-card and just copy files to it and not do tricky (boot)sector writes in some reserved space in the first part of the SD-card.
If you do the normal Debian apt dist-upgrade, you get all sorts of info while upgrading and your own/special software usually keeps running without any changes. So I noticed that you had already done successfully the dist-upgrade. It is then only this radical change in kernel and firmware packages and that is specific to how a Pi and also almost every other SBC boots. The old Bullseye method breaks Debian Linux initramfs flow actually. Lots of troubles with that.
I did use Pis in the past assuming they booted the same way as PC with BIOS, so reading some first sector form the SD-card or so. For backups I just copied the first 100MB of the SD-card into a file on my NAS, same as for PCs. But I think around when the P3B+ came on the market, I saw the Broadcom SoC can simply understand and read FAT filesystems, so then I searched a bit like: https://www.google.com/search?q=raspber ... +explained
From there, you can see what files are needed on the FAT partition. In RPiOS Bookworm, it is like Ubuntu and Opensuse did already earlier: they keep a normal compatible Linux rootfs and copy just the firmware and kernel and/or bootmanager to the FAT (bootpartition or bootfs). It is handled by script: /etc/initramfs/post-update.d/z50-raspi-firmware
This script had flaws at release time almost a year ago, but now seems to work correctly even when you have own or non-RPi kernels in /boot
So it is just a matter of several years getting Windows PC's dual-boot with Linux and booting Android phones with own 'custom ROM' and booting non-RPI SBCs with Linux that learned me that the Pis are easy to get booted as you can take out the SD-card and just copy files to it and not do tricky (boot)sector writes in some reserved space in the first part of the SD-card.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Wed Sep 11, 2024 7:16 am