Armbian images are now available for Rock 5b!

#143

Amateurs are not willing to pay anything for software. Especially not for Linux. Its free. Why paying for?

Mainline is joint effort, a mixture of donations, sponsorship and various business interests. Its done when its done and it remains a big burden keeping it functional. Bill is extreme. Can’t go faster and can’t be paid by one vendor as all other vendor could be paying nothing, benefits the same and kill the one that pay for R&D … mainline is a complex and expensive question.

It is interesting to see how people are happy, unsatisfied and completely ignorant to software development … “I purchase a hardware and it has to work. I don’t care. I expect fully functionality. Fix it. No, I have no interest to pay your time fixing it. You just have to fix it.” and answer to this can not be nice as at least we didn’t sell you anything. Yet.

#144

Same here, finally managed to boot directly from NVMe using my 65w Dell USB-C PD power supply …

It now boots reliably using it with both SD (slow ass one) and NVMe at least with armbian jammy image and its associated SPI image.

Is the magic done in the new SPI code ? Who knows …

I was using a 5v 6A dumb USB charger before which allowed me to write on the NVMe but booting from it systematically failed, voltage drop down issue under load using 5v ?

Looks like 20v was negociated

—>

tcpm_source_psy_4_0022-i2c-4-22
Adapter: rk3x-i2c
in0: 20.00 V (min = +20.00 V, max = +20.00 V)
curr1: 3.25 A (max = +3.25 A)

<—

#145

Bssed on your experience can some please recommend me a 1TB nvme, an eMMC module for Rock5b ? Thanks in advance.

#146

I’m using a Samsung EVO 970 1TB which I had on hand, it works great with booting direct to nvme on debian, with updated SPI. I didn’t buy this specifically for the Rock5B, but performance is great.

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#147

Rockchip and ARM Mali could at least open up their standards for their RK3588 and G610 respectively. This isn’t costly to them and avoids costly reverse engineering. Hardware vendors can do a lot more to enable Mainline development, both Linux kernel and Mesa Panfrost (not Panfork). And yes I do believe Radxa, as board vendor, has some responsibility, and is overselling as they claim, I quote: “Open Source Hardware” (it isn’t) and “completely compatible with (…) Vulkan1.2” (Vulkan isn’t working).

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#148

I got a WD and I believe their blue range is sufficient as interfaces maxes out well below internal spec of the blues

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#149

Just wanted to confirm that after applying the workaound, I was able to install and run docker.

Installation of Docker with armbian-config --> Software --> Softy --> Docker

root@rock-5b:~# docker --version
Docker version 20.10.22, build 3a2c30b

root@rock-5b:~# docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES

root@rock-5b:~# systemctl status -l docker.service
● docker.service - Docker Application Container Engine
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-12-19 19:16:30 PST; 30min ago
TriggeredBy: ● docker.socket
Docs: https://docs.docker.com
Main PID: 9356 (dockerd)
Tasks: 15
Memory: 28.8M
CPU: 2.590s
CGroup: /system.slice/docker.service
└─9356 /usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock

1 Like
#150

The Samsung EVO 980 1TB I’m using works fine as long as you have a good power supply.

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#151

Talking about vulkan, there is little Radxa can do here. arm mali G610 does support Vulkan 1.2 and it has a working driver for … Android. GNU Linux is always second-class citizen for these vendors due to small market size.

#152

Originally, I wanted a flutter development environment on arm64, so I bought rock5b.
The original radxa failed due to a fatal error(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74847885/occur-fatal-error-when-trying-to-run-command-flutter-create-xxxcd-xxxflutter). Since armbian can use wayland, maybe flutter will work? I’m trying to migrate to armbian now, but if flutter doesn’t work after migrating. . . I would like someone to check if flutter works on armbian.

#153

Thank you for the guide. Unfortunately it doesn’t work at all with my system. After copying the armbian image to the nvme drive and rebooting there is an error message “/dev/mmcblk0p1 does not exist”

  • Why is there no easy way to install the OS like there is for Raspberry Pis?
  • Why is there no possibility to select boot devices?

Edit: now it booted for some reason :rofl:

#154

Happy to hear that…

#155

why do you need sd? are you sure it isn’t booting from SD instead as I believe it is default boot order in case there is both NVMe and SD. unless you put dummy SD with no OS installed

bought 1TB and 2TB WD SN770, working well

1 Like
#156

What I’m expecting from radxa is no flaws in hardware implementation, and that their board is able to exploit at least as much as performance as other board vendors (like khadas edge 2,…).
If this is the case then I don’t regret buying this device.

Regarding drivers support, I also consider it is more Rockchip’s (and Mali’s) responsability than Radxa. I agree they should just avoid advertising more than their board is capable of doing

1 Like
#157

I’ve used SD to bootstrap the board and then installed Armbian on NVMe with the builtin install script (armbian-install). I’m sure it boots from NVMe as it boots from it with the SD removed.

Also with the Armbian SPI image the boot order is always SD first then NVMe from what I can tell.

#158

ah sorry, but I have bad news. Got home from work and tried to start the system, but it’s stuck with blue LED.

#159

I could not make A2 wifi work on armbian.

#160

I just checked that on two new boards and this works only for jammy, but armbian with debian use some spi image which don’t support booting from nvme. I usually compile armbian myself but this time I downloaded official images and only updated all packages (which BTW changed login headline from community support to no end user support). Script was able to move system to nvme and update spi block, but image was not correct - it can’t detect nvme and boot from it. The one that worked was image from https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi (that one for armbian).

@bearpaw board is probably good, just several builds needs more tests, for now armbian-install don’t work for some variants.

#161

Hello @dominik,

We brought this up internally and it’s a bug, it should still say it is Community Supported. This will hopefully be addressed here sometime in the near future.

Thanks for letting us know!
Cheers!

#162

This detail makes just a bit of confusion, understandably anything can be broken on custom images, so I needed to pay extra attention for right image. The main issue now is that debian needs different spi to work for now and this variant of armbian-install is incomplete.

Other thoughts on this script:

  • @igorp said he just added linux formatted nvme and run script, I tried with brand new nvme drive, checked if it’s working, but did not created partitions yet, drive was not found in script, but it listed two eMMC drives (one to small and one that was source)
  • when I added partitions/fs to nvme it showed up, but then it warned me that dest will be formatted and asked for new fs
  • it estimated copy time to about 4 min, it took about 20s, AFAIR showing some progress
  • it asked for spi update, this time estimated for few minutes, that one took much more time than earlier and no progress (RKDevTool shows) was given.