Cheers, btw. Did this and was able to get both Fedora 40 and Fedora 41 (which I accidentally downloaded 
) to boot.
It is, however, unbelievably slow lmao. It looks like the CPU is doing all of the graphics rendering, which makes sense since the GPU patch was only just sent upstream for 6.10 I believe.
Back to Joshua Riek’s ubuntu for now!
@Rush – Is that Armbian 23.2.1 Jammy Gnome with panfork?
Panthor is scheduled for mainline kernel 6.10, yes.
If Radxa officially supported EDK and actively worked towards SystemReady certification there wouldn’t be a need for “does my distro work” threads because they’d just work…
Sorry not sure what you’re asking about. If you mean what kernel am I switching back to, yes I believe Joshua’s “Linux-rockchip” is forked from Armbian’s and uses the panfork driver.
As an aside, I’ve tried to run collaboras prebuilt Debian image just to see what it’s like, since it seems they made a ***load of kernel patches for the chip using this very board, but I just couldn’t get it to boot. Not sure whether it has to do with how I’m flashing the image to the SD, or something similar to do with the bootloader/SPI but it just hasn’t worked.
Is UEFI Really necessary ?
I am currently running a heavy modified version of https://github.com/inindev/rock-5b (Debian Bookworm with Kernel 6.6.x Patched).
But it really looks like I’ll need to transition to Fedora, since Podman version 4.9.x (from Debian Testing before they introduced all this libc6 2.38+ and time64 Breaking Changes) just doesn’t cut it with Pasta Networking.
But concerning Fedora I am quite lost on how to set it up. I am currently booting and have / on SDCard EXT4 (just for increased reliability), while my main storage is on NVME with ZFS.
Thanks for your Help 
.
Hello silverstone,
for Fedora UEFI (see my message in top) is mandory, because Fedora don’t have any boot manager for this board at the moment. On my system I’ve installed the whole OS on NVME with ext4, nothing on SD-Card.
Greetings
Andreas
Hi linuxfriend,
Thank you for your quick reply 
.
I guess the UEFI part can be managed somehow.
About the sdcard not working that would be a problem because I currently have all my data on NVME (ZFS) and I don’t plan to change that. In case something goes wrong it’s so much easier to just take the sdcard off rather than opening the case and take the NVME drive out.
Worst case USB 2.0 Flashdrive for / on ext4 maybe (USB 3.0 is NOT currently supported yet) ?
USB2 and USB3 is working fine on my system. But I’m using it only for keyboard, bluetooth, scanner, and so on. External Storage on USB3 is also working.
Don’t know if USB2.0 flashdrive for / is working, give it a try.
Andreas
USB 3 is working for you 
?
According to https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md it may in fact already be in Kernel 6.8.x. I thought it was Kernel 6.10.x. Oh well .
Is there a way to backup the existing bootloader before flashing according to https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi ?
Hopefully I’ll give it a try soon.
Yes, USB3 is working. I’ve attached for backups a 8 TB USB3-Disk.
Running Fedora Rawhide with kernel 6.10.0-0.rc3.32.fc41.aarch64. Why backup bootlaoder? If you don’t like to work with Fedora, you can always overwrite the SPI with the original from Radxa.
Give fedora on Rock 5 a try.
Andreas
Is there a prior version of the spi bootloader available?
After installling the last version I am not able to start the u-boot loader
from sd-card. Worked before. Any repo for previous spi-files?
I meant backup in case something were to go wrong.
But fair enough, if it gets bricked, I cannot boot to restore it anyways
On another note I might want to try using a Raspberry PI first (unrelated I know …), but it seems that the (Server) Image uses XFS Filesystem. I want EXT4 because I think it’s more reliable (NOT as ZFS of course but still …). Do you know if it’s possible to build a Custom Image with the desired Filesystem ?
I was finally getting ready to give Fedora a spin on the Rock 5B itself, but … the Tutorial https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi doesn’t really say anything about enabling the SPI. Looking around it looks like this is something that first needs to be enabled (rsetup ??? - I don’t even see where I can download it from) and/or some DTB needs to be compiled or enabled. Any Idea @linuxfriend ?
EDIT 1: I’m currently trying to build from Source from https://github.com/radxa-pkg/rsetup
You don’t need to enable anything, just flash the right image to it. It’s just a piece of memory. Visible on Linux as mtdblk....
If it were so easy I would already have done it …
root@rock5b-02:~# ls -l /dev/mt*
ls: cannot access '/dev/mt*': No such file or directory
That’s why I’m asking …
Oh, I just noticed this was 2 months old.
Just boot a distro that actually works out of the box and doesn’t usually break with updates (like Joshua Riek’s Ubuntu or Armbian), flash what you need to the SPI, then continue with Fedora.
Yeah, that was my backup plan .
Kinda PITA to need yet another microSD just for that but yeah, no other easy way out apparently. SPI doesn’t seem to have been mainlined yet (nor did the patches I used enable it apparently).
I have managed to get Fedora Workstation (rawhide) working on the ERock5b. I think Fedopra 42 also works but I didnt try that:
(It should be possible to avoid this and use a sd card using the spi-flashing-disk utility that comes with the arm-image-installer in Fedora, but I could not get a display (might be due to ultrawide monitor with nonstandard resolution).
install flatpak, add fedora flatpak repository to get a decent browser and install firefox
go to https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/pbrobinson/u-boot/builds/ and for latest successful build, click on id, go to bottom, click on repository for right version and download uboot-tools/uboot-images-copr.
At time of writing current one for rawhide is: https://download.copr.fedorainfracloud.org/results/pbrobinson/u-boot/fedora-rawhide-aarch64/08947899-uboot-tools/uboot-images-copr-2025.04-1.fc43.noarch.rpm
using xarchiver extract the u-boot-rockship-spi.bin from the rpm file.
follow https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi and in step 3, instead of sudo dd if=spi-image.img of=/dev/mtdblock0 do sudo dd if=u-boot-rockship-spi.bin of=/dev/mtdblock0
Download nightly fedora build from https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/nightlies.html I chose Workstation raw-xz variant
(or you can choose this version from the normal stable page if you are trying with the Fedora 42 stable or subsequent release) and dd that onto nvme or emmc.
First time booting from emmc took a while for me and systemd-resolved timed out with, but it booted and it was all working and there seemed to be a lot of random stuff that passed by on the screen while booting, but it eventually booted.
Display/GPU: Resolution upto 4k at 30fps works, or 3440x1440 (ultrawide) at 60fps. I think higher resolutions will be available when kernel 6.16 is included in a couple of months where some 4k60 support work has been mainlined. Then my native resolution of 5120x2160 might also be available…
Wifi: I use an intel ax210 wifi card on mine and it worked out of the box.
Ethernet: Works
Performance:
Resource usage was good but resources from flatpak didn’t show gpu utilisation. I am not sure if that is due to the performance counters not being implemented or whether the gpu uses different one not known to the app.
Using gtk inspector (CTRL+SHIFT+D on a gtk4 app) I could see the screen refreshing at 60fps for upto 3440x1440 resolution and at 30fps at 4k resolution. RAM usage was around 4GB.
So far its pretty impressive.
Note that after flashing the spi, the armbian image will no longer boot. I am not sure what boot order is set in the SPI or how to change it - i think pressing the up and down arrows on the keyboard changes order, but I could not see the screen output there on my ultrawidescreen monitor.
Hello NaheemSays, your steps also works with Fedora 42. For better GPU support ( better resolution, 2. Monitor), the only thing I’ve changed is kernel 6.15.0-rc3 from Rawhide