I had noticed that my Raspberry Pi 4B which is a dedicated Bitcoin and Lightning node was still on kernel 5.15 when all my other Raspberry Pi’s based on Debian 11 have been upgraded to kernel 6.1. So I went to force it to kernel 6.1 through using rpi-update, which completed with no errors and showing that it updated to kernel 6.1, but after rebooting it was still on kernel 5.15. Turned out I needed to update my eeprom, bootloader version. You can check with the following command.
sudo rpi-eeprom-update
If it shows an update is available, you can update with the following command.
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -aAfter updating the eeprom I rebooted and then ran rpi-update again. One thing to note is you usually don’t want to run rpi-update unless you’re having an issue and the next firmware and kernel would be to solve the issue as it’s still in testing. But in my case there was a problem and it wasn’t updating to the next kernel properly.
sudo rpi-updateAfter the kernel and firmware are updated, time for another reboot and you should be on the latest kernel, 6.1 LTS. And this is a pretty new kernel as some of my Arch based distributions have just switched to the brand new 6.3 kernel, with most other distributions on kernel 6.2. And this is technically a much newer kernel than the Debian stock kernel 5.10. And I run Debian 12 Beta as one of my daily rotation GNU/Linux distributions, and it’s on kernel 6.1, so our Raspberry Pis are pretty up to date for a Debian based distribution.
