my Raspberry Pi 3 has its /boot partition on a microSD card and the root / partition on an external SSD connected to one of its USB ports. It has been running and upgraded over five years regularly with only one or two major hiccups. The last happened when upgrading the package raspberrypi-bootloader-20251208-2-any.pkg.tar.xz. Afterwards the system couldn't mount the root partition and got stuck in emergency mode at the boot screen (USB connection seems to have been compromised, since connecting a USB keyboard didn't work either). The system runs ARMv7. Fortunately all that was required to revert it to a working state was to downgrade the package raspberrypi-bootloader (using chroot). This time the problem wasn't the kernel. I am just putting this out here in case anyone else runs into the same issue. Merry Christmas and happy holidays.
