Hey all,

I'm trying to update a very old embedded Linux build (Angstrom 2012 with kernel 3.8.13) with a newer kernel build, as it has some important fixes for me in built-in I2C driver.

The /boot/ directory has a zImage-3.8.13 file and a zImage symlink to it.

How hard will it be to update the Kernel? So far I've tried dropping in a 4.x kernel zImage from the latest Angstrom build, but it boots to a black screen with no logs.

You are more or less going to have to upgrade the entire OS. You should be able to get it to boot by recompiling a new kernel and its modules and installing it, along with an updated bootloader, but chances are a whole lot of supporting programs will no longer work because they have been compiled against the previous kernel. It usually works in the majority of the cases when you are updating from one minor version to another within the same major, but 3.8 to 4.9 is probably not going to work.

Unless it was a home brew distribution, you are probably better off to redo your environment from whatever buildroot it came from (but updated).

Alternatively you could hack the new I2C driver patch into your 3.8 kernel source, and recompile your kernel.

I've found out the fix I want is actually in 3.10. What about upgrading to this?

if you could make a full backup....
why don't you try it? Did you try to contact the maintainer(s)?

You should be able to update from 3.8 to 3.10 without issue.

I might be tempted to look to yocto.

The other question I guess could be found in change logs in their distro maybe. I assume you'd have to look at the driver changes. Maybe initrd.