Tumbleweed ARM’s November Pi Changes Reach Beyond the Kernel

The November Tumbleweed ARM report puts Raspberry Pi owners in front of three quite different update questions. Can the board find its boot drive? Is it running the kernel that was installed? Does a Pi 5 camera stream have the dimensions the application requested? The package names behind those questions are not interchangeable.

The project’s report, published on November 11, covers snapshots from October 18 through November 8. It is a summary of changes already delivered across that period, rather than a single new image or a promise that every supported board received the same features.

Start with the part that finds your storage

For 64-bit Raspberry Pi images, u-boot-rpiarm64 moved to 2026.10 in the November 5 snapshot. U-Boot discovers hardware before Linux starts. A failure to find a USB drive or an NVMe device can therefore belong to this earlier stage, even when the kernel package itself is current.

GRUB2 2.16 arrived in the October 18 snapshot, ahead of the U-Boot change. It adds native NVMe support, AMBA PL011 serial output and Btrfs inspection commands. On a board normally used without a monitor, those serial messages may be the best account of what happened before Linux started. The announcement does not certify every storage enclosure or NVMe add-on.

Keep installed packages and the running kernel separate

The November 5 snapshot introduced kernel 7.3.1. Before investigating a regression, note the board model, boot medium and snapshot, then compare the installed kernel package with the release reported by uname -r. A machine that has not restarted may still be running its previous kernel.

Look for the installed U-Boot and GRUB packages as well as kernel-default in YaST or zypper. Keep a note of the old versions. openSUSE recommends having spare boot media to hand for a first start with new Raspberry Pi bootloader code. That is particularly useful when the device you are updating is also the device you normally use to prepare a replacement card.

Pi 5 camera users have another package to check

The November 8 snapshot brought libpisp 1.8.0. According to the project, its GStreamer backend now consistently applies smart resize and crop while configuring streams. This concerns the geometry requested from the PiSP processing path, so a camera problem involving unexpected dimensions deserves a libpisp check alongside the kernel. It is a different diagnostic route from a machine that cannot find its boot disk.

Our earlier Tumbleweed ARM article covered wireless firmware and virtual machines in the preceding update window. These November Pi changes concern boot discovery, the running kernel and camera processing. If you need to report a fault, include which of those tasks fails, the board model, boot medium and package versions. A report that says only “the update broke my Pi” leaves out the details needed to distinguish them.