Yorick Downe yorickdowne

The issue

Some custom installations of Debian may have more than one EFI System Partition, ESP. Debian only upgrades the ESP mounted to /boot/efi when switching Debian major versions, which can lead to boot failures. OVH for example deployed Debian on mdadm raid this way, until the 12th of November 2025, when they switched to raid1 ESP for fresh Debian 13 installations.

If yours is a standard Debian install, you have one ESP and a Debian upgrade will work without issue.

If you or your provider installed Debian with multiple ESPs, read on for a way to handle this.

Debian 14 "Forky"

This is a placeholder gist for upgrade to Debian 14 "Forky" in summer 2027. Using it before this release date is risky. Here be dragons.

To start, read the official release notes.

If your install fits into "vanilla Debian plus maybe a handful of 3rd-party repos", then this guide for a simple upgrade to Debian 14 "forky" from Debian 13 "trixie" can be helpful. 3rd-party repos are handled with a find command.

If you are on a fork of Debian such as RasPI OS, use their instructions, not this gist.

This is a placeholder gist for the Ubuntu 26.04.1 release, expected on August 9th 2026. do-release-upgrade will only update from 24.04 LTS once 26.04.1 LTS has been released.

Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon"

To start, read the official release notes.

If your install fits into "vanilla Ubuntu plus maybe a handful of 3rd-party repos", then this guide for a simple upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" from Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" can be helpful. 3rd-party repos are handled manually.

Holesky has been sunset

As of 2025-10-20, Holesky has been sunset. The replacement testnet is Hoodi.

Historical content below, no longer relevant

Recover Eth Docker Holesky setup

You need:

64 GiB of RAM, or 32 GiB + 32 GiB swap. 16 GiB is unlikely to work

The issue

Asus (formerly Intel) NUCs weren't designed for use as a 24/7 server, though they see enthusiastic use as such. Some users report instability. And while some of that can be bad RAM or a faulty motherboard / CPU, some can also just be configuration issues. And some is plain heat.

It's a little tough to nail it down. Here are some good practices to follow, to have a stable NUC.

BIOS update

Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish"

To start, read the official release notes.

If your install fits into "vanilla Ubuntu plus maybe a handful of 3rd-party repos", then this guide for a simple upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" from Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" can be helpful. 3rd-party repos are handled with a find command.

Intel NUC 11/12/13 with I225-LM or I225-V Ethernet chip may cause "freezing" of the OS after this update, if wired Ethernet is in use. There are some reports that a BIOS update plus using the hwe kernel can resolve that.

Debian 13 "Trixie"

To start, read the official release notes.

If your install fits into "vanilla Debian plus maybe a handful of 3rd-party repos", then this guide for a simple upgrade to Debian 13 "trixie" from Debian 12 "bookworm" can be helpful. 3rd-party repos are handled with a find command.

If you are on a fork of Debian such as RasPI OS, use their instructions, not this gist.

Note upgrade is only supported from Debian 12 to Debian 13. If you are on Debian 11, upgrade to Debian 12 first. Then once on Debian 12, you can upgrade to Debian 13.

Overview

Besu, an Ethereum execution layer client, is optimized for minimal database growth (7-8 GiB/week) with default parameter --bonsai-limit-trie-logs-enabled. It can use RAM for more block processing speed.

If you have 64 GiB of RAM or more, you can add --Xplugin-rocksdb-high-spec-enabled=true for better performance.

A long-running Besu DB, started before trie-log limit was enabled, will have sizeable trie log storage. This can be reduced with a one-off prune using the storage trie-log prune subcommand, assuming Besu 24.7.0 or later.

Somer Esat adjustment

Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat"

To start, read the official release notes.

If your install fits into "vanilla Ubuntu plus maybe a handful of 3rd-party repos", then this guide for a simple upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" from Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" can be helpful. 3rd-party repos are handled with a find command.

Note upgrade is only supported from Ubuntu 22.04 or later to Ubuntu 24.04. If you are on Ubuntu 20.04, upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 first. Then once on Ubuntu 22.04, you can upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04.

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	# NO WARRANTY, express or implied, for this script. It is risky: A bug in it may keep your system from booting
	#
	# This script is intended to help me when upgrading Debian on dual-disk OVH baremetal machines with multiple ESPs,
	# installed before OVH switched to raid1 ESPs for Debian 13 installs on the 12th of November 2025, see
	# https://community.ovhcloud.com/community/en/upcoming-change-efi-system-partition-over-raid1-for-linux-installations?id=community_question&sys_id=8602b59034ac7290f078f43c21c5a60d
	#
	# Assumptions
	# 1) The UUID of the partition that holds /boot/grub is linked in <ESP-partition>/EFI/<bootloader-id>/grub.cfg .
	# grub.cfg in EFI is generated only for signed images (shim + grub-efi-$arch-signed), amd64 and arm64 only.