I’ve been working through an issue for a few days, where nearly any of the newer images (e.g. Armbian) I put on ROCK Pi 4B+ v1.73 (EMMC, no SPI) units will have some or various issues. Very often the units will flash fine (using RKDevTool 2.81), boot up once or twice, but then have very poor stability, or refuse to boot until power is taken off and then on a few times.
For some examples of things going wrong, often u-boot will just hang at a various step. Example:
U-Boot TPL 2022.07-armbian-2022.07-Se092-P621f-Hc48d-Vf30b-Bb703-R448a (Aug 06 2025 - 12:28:11)
Channel 0: LPDDR4, 50MHz
BW=32 Col=10 Bk=8 CS0 Row=14/15 CS1 Row=13/15 CS=2 Die BW=16 Size=768MB
Channel 1: LPDDR4, 50MHz
BW=32 Col=10 Bk=8 CS0 Row=14/15 CS1 Row=14/15 CS=2 Die BW=16 Size=1024MB
u-boot will hang here, show wrong values for RAM, etc.
Other times, u-boot finishes and switches over to kernel, but we get this:
Starting kernel …
efi_free_pool: illegal free 0x0000000068f0d040
efi_free_pool: illegal free 0x0000000068f0a040
This is not always fatal, sometimes OS boots, but often we get nothing after this point.
I have an older image that seems to run fine compared to anything new, this one: Armbian_22.08.0-trunk_Rockpi-4b_bullseye_current_5.15.58_minimal.img. But of course this is older, and I’d rather start with a newer image rather than try to upgrade from the old.
The official release repo has nothing marked release, only test and pre-release https://github.com/radxa-build/rock-pi-4b-plus/releases
Other repo is outdated to 2023 https://github.com/radxa-build/rock-pi-4b/releases
This one is marked EOL, last builds 2023 https://github.com/radxa/debos-radxa/releases/tag/eol-notice
What is the most stable, supported, up to date OS suggested for production use of the ROCK 4B+? We bought thousands of these devices for headless edge IOT use case and were originally told support would last until nearly 2030, but it seems that there is not much support for this board anymore in terms of software? Are the best options just community builds (which don’t seem too stable anyway?)
We took a leap of faith with Radxa when COVID affected production capacity for other SBC, but it has been a real pain to support the devices since then because of a lack of perceived support for the hardware and software.
Any info appreciated, thank you for viewing.