I recently upgraded from v3.42 to v3.54 on a rpi 3B+ and found that i2c has stopped working. That is, if I run i2cdetect -y 1 it runs slowly, finds no i2c devices, and dmesg displays a bunch of error messages:
i2c-bcm2835 3f804000.i2c: i2c transfer timed out
If I use the “Stored firmware” option to swap back to v3.42 then it correctly detects the connected i2c devices.
I’ve installed a new v3.42 on the v3.54 root partition, and that has the same issue. The original v3.42 partition continues to work flawlessly, which seems to suggest the cause is some modification (or lack of) to the file system.