Kernel 6.12.20+rpt-rpi appears to have broken SenseHat support

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
c, linux, python, raspberry-pi

Research direction

Start by reproducing the failure on a Raspberry Pi 5 with kernel 6.12.20+rpt-rpi, the SenseHat connected, and dtparam=i2c_arm=on; compare it with 6.6.74+rpt-rpi. Use the traceback in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sense_hat/sense_hat.py, especially _init_humidity, as the entry point. Done means SenseHat humidity initialization works after upgrading to 6.12.20.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Describe the bug

After upgrading from kernel 6.6.74+rpt-rpi to 6.12.20+rpt-rpi the device init fails:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sense_hat/sense_hat.py", line 640, in temp
     return self.get_temperature_from_humidity()
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sense_hat/sense_hat.py", line 612, in get_temperature_from_humidity
     self._init_humidity()  # Ensure humidity sensor is initialised
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sense_hat/sense_hat.py", line 579, in _init_humidity
     raise OSError('Humidity Init Failed')
 OSError: Humidity Init Failed

Downgrading the kernel with:

sudo apt purge linux-image-6.12.20+rpt-rpi-2712 linux-image-6.12.20+rpt-rpi-v8
sudo apt reinstall linux-image-6.6.74+rpt-rpi-2712 linux-image-6.6.74+rpt-rpi-v8

makes it work again without any other changes.

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

Upgrade the kernel to 6.12.20 (sudo apt update; sudo apt dist-upgrade).

Having the SenseHat connected and dtparam=i2c_arm=on in /boot/firmware/config.txt, try to run, e.g.

from sense_hat import SenseHat

sense = SenseHat()
sense.clear()

temp = sense.get_temperature_from_humidity()
print(temp)

Notice that an OSError: Humidity Init Failed is thrown.

Device (s)

Raspberry Pi 5

System
Raspberry Pi reference 2023-10-10
Generated using pi-gen, https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen, 962bf483c8f326405794827cce8c0313fd5880a8, stage2
2025/03/19 13:41:26 
Copyright (c) 2012 Broadcom
version cec1d3ae (release) (embedded)
Linux 6.12.20+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.20-1+rpt1 (2025-03-19) aarch64 GNU/Linux
Logs

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Additional context

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Dominant language
C
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