FPP 9.5 to 10.1: In-Place Upgrade or Fresh Install?

If you’re still running Falcon Player 9.5, there’s a decision to make before you jump to 10.1: do you use FPP’s built-in in-place upgrade, or back up your settings, re-image the SD card, and restore?

It’s not a trivial choice. FPP v10 runs on a newer Raspbian kernel than 9.5, and that kernel handles the device tree — the map your OS uses to talk to GPIO pins, SPI interfaces and USB controllers. A lot of pixel controller boards and hats rely on drivers and overlays tied to that map, which is exactly the kind of thing an in-place upgrade has to reconcile live, on a system that’s already running.

In my latest video, I walk through both upgrade paths on real hardware so you can see exactly what’s involved in each:

The in-place upgrade — what FPP needs before it can pull the release from GitHub (a working internet connection, DHCP or a correctly configured static IP with DNS), plus a note for BeagleBone Black owners about a kernel bug in the original 10.1 image that’s since been fixed in 10.1.2.

The fresh install — backing up your settings through FPP’s built-in tool, re-imaging the card with Raspberry Pi Imager, and restoring your configuration onto a clean 10.1 install.

The short version: if you can get to your SD card without a fight, a fresh install gives you the exact kernel and driver set the FPP team actually tested — and you keep your old card as a fallback if anything goes wrong. If your controller’s mounted somewhere the SD card is genuinely hard to reach, an in-place upgrade is a perfectly reasonable choice — just go in knowing what it’s trusting the upgrade script to handle, and take a backup first regardless.