Will it support Proxmox or OPNSense?

#1

Will it support Proxmox or OPNSense?

I pre-ordered one (again, without knowing if mainline-support will come).

Since the RK3588 the mainline-support was very lackluster, still is (even tho involved people give a lot of their resources to it). Now with the RK3588 situation worsened, thanks to the parts being used in war-drones,

I have to ask.

With the PCI-E (Gen4 8 lane) giving the options for nearly any NIC you can get, this would open a world of opportunities for building a router/firewall/server platform. With low power requirements.

But then, again, what (apart of UEFI and not only device-tree) level of hardware-support for kernels/linux/FreeBSD will we get here (or will we be stuck with OpenWRT and blobs in a far future) and on what time-frame can we have our expectations?

Thank you for a non-marketing and instead a direct answer to this.

#2

Officially? Not yet

Unofficially: https://github.com/jiangcuo/Proxmox-Port has an arm64 iso which should just work with UEFI

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#3

Thank you @meco! I will try that out when I have the hardware.

#4

UEFI is not magic trick making things work.

Nearly every aarch64 system boots using EFI (or can do) in either EDK2 or U-Boot.

Having proper support in mainline kernel is always needed. And then having thing enabled in distribution kernel.

NanoPC-T6 which I have on desk can boot using UEFI+ACPI. But it does not give it video output on Fedora 40 cause there is no support for it in used kernel.

#5

Then lets hope the Orion O6 gets better mainline support from the start than RK3588(S), including the hardware surrounding the chip!

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#6

I received the 64GB version of the board yesterday, and I have to say the official system image provides the smoothest and most seamless desktop experience I’ve ever had on an Arm development board.

I installed an NVMe drive, followed the instructions to create a USB boot disk, and wrote the system to the NVMe. It was pretty much plug-and-play, immediately supporting 2K at 120 Hz and 4K at 60 Hz with no strange bugs, both HDMI & DP also sound works well. The GNOME runs very smoothly—window switching and dragging with the mouse feel great. There’s no need to fiddle with odd drivers or software packages.

It also comes with Chromium, which supports GPU acceleration (check chrome://gpu). WebGL tests run at full frame rate, and it can smoothly play 8K 60 Hz videos on YouTube.

(In comparison, I recently tried the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Super, and its out-of-the-box experience was not as good. I had to use multiple versions of its image to update firmware repeatedly. Moreover, the repo Chrome didn’t support GPU acceleration, and there’s a long-standing bug that hasn’t been addressed.)

If anyone’s interested, I tested this Proxmox port (by install over radax image’s debian 12, not ISOs) on O6. ProxmoxVE worked as expected—I could boot ISO, QCOW2, and other images, nic works. However, when installing a certain modified version of openEuler, the VM randomly stopped if there was too much GUI interaction. I haven’t yet explored in detail how tasks are scheduled across big and little cores or other potential causes.

Additionally, I want to point out that this kernel appears to be modified, and I haven’t found documentation on how to compile it yet. When I tried installing WireGuard, I encountered numerous issues—mainly because it tried to install or compile the kernel with DKMS, but failed.

I also ran into filesystem feature / permission-related limitations when installing Cloudflare WARP; for instance, certain features on the filesystem weren’t enabled, cause apt script fail to configure.

Also. I haven’t had any success installing other operating systems (without vm) yet, as most attempts get stuck at the EFI boot stage. I did try just copy the kernel (lib/modules) but critical feature didn’t open, e.g. some sysfs mapping, causing even chroot can’t run any program.

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#7

Do you have any opengl or vulkan benchmarks?