@Rush – Is that Armbian 23.2.1 Jammy Gnome with panfork?
Panthor is scheduled for mainline kernel 6.10, yes.
Fedora on Rock 5
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…
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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.
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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).