What happened to Armbian Rock5b support?

ROCK 5 Series 5B/5B+
1

Greeting everyone,

What happened to all the images for Rock 5b Armbian Standard support? Am I missing something? Seems like the Rock 5b+ is getting new images Standard support and Rock 5b is missing. (Community Support)

The 5b is not even displayed on the page anymore just the 5b+ for supported devices.
Was this board dropped from Standard support for a reason? Just trying to figure out with what to go with now as I have dropped Joshua’s Ubuntu as that support has been dropped as well so I am trying to get something solid like Armbian and yet that seems to have dropped support as well.

Community support only for Rock5b from now on is that correct?

https://www.armbian.com/rock-5b/ Had to explicitly go to the URL to even find the board.
https://www.armbian.com/rock-5b-plus/

Thanks for listening,

Del Mar

2

Some of them are here: https://armbian.systemonachip.net/archive/rock-5b/archive/
Maybe they just doing cleanup, @igorp may know something more

4

If there is no active dedicated volunteer maintainer, it can only stay as community automatic build, which is a normal way, especially in ArchLinux rolling world. We are seeking people all the time - for hard & unpaid jobs.

No. This status is changing usually at main release. If maintainer will join and be active by the next release, its upgraded, else not.

5

Got it!

Thank you Igor!

6

ROCK 5B+ is a super set of ROCK 5B, anything that runs on ROCK 5B+ can run without issue on ROCK 5B. So actually you can just download the ROCK 5B+ image and flash it to ROCK 5B.

7

Good to know. Then we have it covered:

8

What about DTB for those two boards and specific stuff like HDMI inputs?
Has 5B+ same bug about usb-pd that required some startup delay? Are images still with it?

9

Hi Jack,

I tried the main desktop armbian release for the Rock 5b+ and it didn’t work…

It booted and started, but once I updated and upgraded it, it refused to boot. I have not tested other available images but there appear to be enough differences in firmware would be my guess.

This is the image I tried to no avail.

image
image1146×622 57.8 KB

10

Please just use regular armbian for Rock5B you can build an image with armbians build tool where you just need to select your flavour

11

Hey Meco,

Yeah, that is fine, I was curious as to the reason more than anything else. If that is what I have to do I am fine with that.

12

Just opened a question in the armbian discord since there are two maintainers associated with the board which would at least place it at standard support by my understanding

13

As far As I remember 5B+ images boots but they report at least some errors in dmesg and power buttons don’t work there.
Still You can just use images from my link and just do apt upgrade - they work and report last version, but I did not had time to test much there. Bifurcation is not working for sure,

14

@dominik @delmard took a look with Igor and it’s corrected now: https://www.armbian.com/rock-5b/

15

Awesome Thank you!

16

Briefly checked minimal image,
boots fine, slowly but eventually get into login,
bunch of errors in dmesg, most about bluetooth which I don’t use, few other smaller
pcie link fail and pcie bifurcation don’t work on this image (same thing works on 5B+) image,

Since build some packages were updated, in fact older image from archive with apt upgrade was the same for me.

17

The Armbian team unleashed version 25.2 on February 24th.
However, I was unable to locate the official build for the rock-5b/5b+, despite the device being categorized as standard support. Will it be released at a later time, or has official support for the rock5b/5b+ been discontinued?

18

yes. Some images are stuck in the testing process - Rock 5x