Hey Guys,
Do you have any idea how much work will be involved to add support for the 5B+. I just bought one and without Armbian and the hardware acceleration patches it’s basically unusable for me. I’m really hoping it will be possible to get it working the same for the 5B+ otherwise I’ll need to sell it and buy an older 5B…
Not that much, really. It’s basically just a matter of copying the device tree from Radxa’s repository, and adding a board config for the build. Hardly a couple hours’ worth of work, yet it’s unverifiable without having the hardware on hand, or a very impatient volunteer willing to help (wink-wink).
Armbian will have a dedicated maintainer for this board but I don’t know if he received hardware by now. ETA can’t be said, but it will be supported.
This is what happens when you create a massive segmentation in your own product stack. With every “new” and “improved” version of the board we delay software support that is mostly all generated by free and open source work.
Since I havent made an update to this guide in a long long time (where some areas still need cleaning) I have started some updating today to make it more user friendly and interactive (if we can call it that).
More archcraft themes
https://github.com/shreyasl10/Dotfiles
https://github.com/l-pontes/myArchcraft
https://github.com/OckhamOdyssey/dotfiles
https://github.com/benjibrown/archcraft-theme-manager
https://github.com/kigaita/archcraft
#Another Theme
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raitonoberu/archcraft-xfce-gruvbox/master/install.sh | bash -s
Sorry I totally missed your comment. I’de totally be willing to test it and see if it works. I just don’t know how to build it…
i there,
i just received my Rock5b Plus. Armbian support would be really great!
i’ve tried adding dts and board config. but beeing new to armbian i’m not sure i am understanding the full process yet.
so if anyone is able to do this, i can build and test
@Stef_Hagner @mxrwp
Hey everybody! I was working on adding Rock5B+ to Armbian so if anyone is interested in trying a prebuilt image (this is for sd card / emmc only to see if everything is being recognized) here it is
Edit: Link taken down as test is complete.
I get " This location can’t be reached." when accessing the link.
Is it possible to post the image somewhere without creating an account ?
No I took it down as the patches got merged. The test image was just to test it working on real HW. A board configuration to armbian/build is following
Sorry for the late reply. Thanks so much for adding a patch! Is the patch now in master so we can build our own images and/or are prebuilt images going up on the armbian site? Thanks again for doing this!!
When this is merged you can build images yourself or just download the config and add it to armbian/build.
It’s merged now! Happy building 
Hey @meco I can report that it boots fine on my radxa 5b+ fine with the latest 6.12. I’ve been trying to rebuild targetting the legacy branch as I need access to the 5.10 kernel that supports hardware accelerated rgba transforms. But every time I try to make a build that targets legacy it won’t boot. I’m thinking it may be because the rk3588-rock-5b-plus.dts file isn’t in linux-dtb-legacy-rk35xx or something. https://mirror.twds.com.tw/armbian-apt/pool/main/l/linux-dtb-legacy-rk35xx/linux-dtb-legacy-rk35xx_24.5.1_arm64__5.10.160-S9fb8-D440d-Pa8bc-C1778H5c21-HK01ba-Vc222-Bf15a-R448a.deb
I couldn’t find any other obvious differences the board conf files for 5b and 5b-plus seem pretty identical otherwise. Do you have any idea what would be necessary to get the rk3588-rock-5b-plus.dts available in a legacy build. I really want to get accelerated rgba processing in gstreamer working and it seems that it isn’t supported in gstreamer only ffmpeg according to radxa from this comment. HDMI Input on Rock 5B
Thanks again for your great work getting armbian working on rock pi 5b+!
I managed to figure it out by connecting to the uart and looking at the error log.
It was saying “** File not found /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3588-radxa-rock-5b+.dtb **”
So I just copied the file “/media/user/armbi_root/boot/dtb-5.10.209-legacy-rk35xx/rockchip# cp rk3588-rock-5b-plus.dtb rk3588-radxa-rock-5b+.dtb”
And it started to boot fine.
The fan control (fan-control-rock5b) for the onboard fan interface in the Radxa 5B Plus board don’t work out of the box in the latest build.
As per the comment of incognito Below it turns out the fan-control is indeed part of the Linux kernel, but the fan is turned off until the CPU temp is 60 and above. This is a bit high for me so I have created a custom overlay to control the fan myself.
kernel values are:
soc-thermal->trips-> 60°C - 85°C - 115°C
cooling-levels = 0 64 128 192 255
Not sure I read this correctly but it seems fan is never at 100%:
| temp | fan |
|---|---|
| 0 - 60 | 0 |
| 60 - 85 | 64 (25%) |
| 85 - 115 | 128 (50%) |
| 115+ | 192 (75%) |
I have created an overlay with new cooling levels that work better for me:
pwm-fan.dts with value:/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;
/ {
fragment@0 {
target = <&fan0>;
__overlay__ {
cooling-levels = <0x30 0x80 0xff 0xff 0xff>;
};
};
};
sudo armbian-add-overlay pwm-fan.dts
Now, it works as I expect it to, the fan is always working but it speeds up when there are higher values.
My fix was to just set it to 100% using:
echo 255 | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/pwm-fan/hwmon/hwmon*/pwm1
Looking into the code lukaszsobala/fan-control-rock5b it may be related to trying to write to /hwmon8/pwm1 while in Armbian 25.2.2 (5b+) it’s /hwmon10/pwm1, but I am not sure this is the actual issue.
So I am sticking with 100% fan for now or may be 80% echo 204 | ...
Again, this repo won’t work with recent kernels as they have a kernel driver for the fan. This fan control repo is just for very old kernels where the only option was a userspace driver.
Always worth to mention that in readme on github front page
It’s been added to the readme