SBC News

When a bug surprises you when doing Apertis packaging of a typical vendor code signing tool, it's time to debug it using the compiler's built-in tools. View the full article

Device drivers can support more revisions and SoC platforms by abstracting away specific hardware interface layouts. Let's examine a specific instance of this process, namely the effort to make the MIPI DSI host controller driver more generic. View the full article

With the code base of the Linux kernel constantly changing and deployed in devices around the world, performing proper testing is crucial. Here's a look at syzkaller, a valuable tool widely adopted by the kernel community to detect bugs in the kernel. View the full article

In my previous blog post, we discussed the importance of testing, what is fuzzing, and how the syzkaller fuzzes the kernel in order to find bugs. Now, let’s install the tool and starting using it to improve our code base. View the full article

In part 2 of this series on syzkaller, we looked at how to install the tool and use it to improve our code base. Now, how does syzkaller report a bug it finds in the execution path of a system call? Let's add a new syscall description and see how it goes. View the full article

Syzkaller is much needed tool for Linux kernel testing and debugging. With some work, it can also be enhanced to find bugs in specific drivers, such as V4L2. Here's how. View the full article

Last year, a (controversial) feature was added to the Linux kernel to support optimized case-insensitive file name lookups in the Ext4 filesystem. Here's a look at why this was merged, what improvements have been made since, and how to put it to work. View the full article

New DRM drivers are being added to almost each new kernel release, and because the mode setting API is so rich and complex, bugs do slip in that translate to differences in behaviour between drivers. View the full article

A step-by-step guide on how to enable 3D acceleration of Vulkan applications in QEMU through the new Venus experimental Vulkan driver for VirtIO-GPU with a local development environment. View the full article

The latest mainline Linux kernel (v6.5) includes 22 patches that enable support for the AV1 uAPI and for two stateless video decoders: one for the Rockchip RK3588 and one for MT8195, a MediaTek SoC. View the full article

With the release of virglrenderer 0.8.0, getting accelerated OpenGL within a virtual machine (VM) made a big leap forward. Since virglrenderer-0.7.0, the code base has seen ~600 commits, and Collabora provided more than 80% of these contributions. View the full article

When working on the Linux Kernel, testing via QEMU is pretty common. Here's a look at virtme, a QEMU wrapper that uses the host instead of a virtual disk, making working with QEMU extremely easy. View the full article

For the past few years a clear trend of containerization of applications and services has emerged. Having processes containerized is beneficial in a number of ways. It both improves portability and strengthens security. View the full article

Monado now has initial support for 6DoF ("inside-out") tracking for devices with cameras and an IMU! Three free and open source SLAM/VIO solutions were integrated and adapted to work on XR: Kimera-VIO, ORB-SLAM3, and Basalt. View the full article

Ever since Vulkan was announced a few years ago, the idea of creating a Vulkan benchmarking tool in the spirit of glmark2 had been floating in my mind. Recently, thanks to my employer, Collabora, this idea has materialized! The result is the vkmark Vulkan benchmark, hosted on github. View the full article

On the road again! Collaborans are heading to London, A Coruña & Buenos Aires to attend a VR event, a hackfest, a conference on Open Source systems, and a day of technical sessions on Vulkan! See you there? View the full article

Today sees the public release of Vulkan 1.0, the next-generation graphics API from the Khronos Group. As a member of Khronos, Collabora has been committed to improving EGL, OpenGL ES and OpenGL itself, and this continues with Vulkan. View the full article

Collabora will be in Vienna for the Media Summit, Open Source Summit Europe, and Linux Plumbers! Catch one of our many talks. View the full article

Wayland 1.25 refreshes its documentation with three new chapters covering Wayland XML specification, content model updates, and color management design. View the full article

Predictable media latency, low power usage and vastly improved A/V sync. Wayland versus X11 explained on ARM MALI View the full article

I had a great time last week and the Web Engines Hackfest! It was the 7th web hackfest hosted by Igalia and the 7th hackfest I attended. I’m almost a local Galician already. Brazilian Portuguese being so close to Galician certainly helps! Collabora co-sponsored the event and it was great that two colleagues of mine managed to join me in attendance. View the full article

Raspberry PI 2 release announcement! View the full article

Next week our friends at Igalia will be hosting this year’s Web Engines Hackfest. Collabora will be there! We are gold sponsors, and have three developers attending. It will also be an opportunity to celebrate Igalia’s 15th birthday. Looking forward to meet you there! View the full article

Meet the newest members of our ever-growing engineering and administrative teams! Welcome Arnaud, Omar, Correntin, Lakshmipathi, Rebecca, Ezequiel, Ritesh, Ana and Zeeshan! View the full article

Despite the many obstacles brought on by the pandemic, Collabora continues to build and strengthen its engineering and administration teams for the road ahead. Join us in welcoming Angelica, Raghavendra, Doug, Italo and Theodotos! View the full article

Collabora's involvement in Open Source XR development continues to grow today as we welcome the libsurvive project, the open source lighthouse tracking system, into the fold! View the full article

For many, June 21, day of the Solstice, is a day of celebrations. At Collabora, we're also celebrating, as we take a moment to welcome all the newest members of our engineering and administration teams who've joined over the last year! View the full article

The latest release of Weston was made on February 1, 2022. Meanwhile, a few bugs were discovered and we decided to do a bug-fix release, which we haven't had in several years. View the full article

Announced earlier this week, Weston 11.0 brings a number of highlights including optimizations in the DRM-backend, color management infrastructure code and multiple RDP improvements. View the full article

Released last week, Weston 12.0 brings a number of highlights including two new backends, support for multiple scanout devices, and the addition of new protocol implementations. Here's a look at some of the changes that have landed in this new version. View the full article

Weston 13.0 brings multiple fixes and important changes, notably the ability to load multiple backends simultaneously. This can be used to load VNC, RDP, or PipeWire backends for remote access alongside the native DRM backend. View the full article

Recently, both Weston 14.0, and 14.0.1 (bug fix) were released. Here's at look at some of the highlights and changes for this latest release of Wayland's reference compositor. View the full article

Collabora is excited to see Monado at the heart of the new OpenXR runtime for Android XR, a major milestone for Open Source XR interoperability. View the full article

Weston 15.0 has arrived, bringing a brand new Lua-based shell for fully customizable window management, an experimental Vulkan renderer, and a host of improvements to color handling, media playback, and display performance. View the full article

Weston 16 expands HDR and color management support, improves Perfetto debugging and DRM backend performance, and adds new protocol and renderer capabilities for more efficient and flexible Wayland compositor development. View the full article

The recent release of version 6 of the Weston compositor has brought with it the weston-debug protocol, a new feature that allows developers and users alike to display on-the-fly various debugging (logging) information generated by the compositor. View the full article

Latest Weston features View the full article

In this second article of a three-part series, I look at how Matt Godbolt uses modern C++ features to try to protect against misusing an API that deals with destructive state transition based on a talk he gave on making code easy to use and hard to misuse. View the full article

Abandoned vendor-provided BSP roadblocks can be overcome when mainline Open Source projects like the Linux kernel are integrated directly. Get your upstreamed BSPs from day one. View the full article

As part of its unwavering commitment to open source and open standards, Collabora is proud to be part of bringing the recently-released OpenXR 1.0 to life, and to be pioneering the Monado open source runtime for OpenXR. View the full article

Back in 2022, after a series of issues were found in its design, I made the call to rework some of WirePlumber's fundamentals in order to allow it to grow. So where are we we now? And what's next? Let's dive in! View the full article

By creating a real-time AI chatbot communication system using WhisperLive and WhisperSpeech, we have addressed the unnatural delay in current bot interactions for seamless conversation. View the full article

Collabora is headed to California to take part in the inaugural edition of AI​.dev: Open Source GenAI & ML Summit, a new event aims to bring together the brightest developers from around the world to shape the trajectory of open source AI. View the full article

Text-to-speech (TTS) models are playing a transformative role, from enriching audiobooks to enhancing podcasts and even improving interactions with chatbots. We're introducing a new player in this field – WhisperSpeech, an Open Source text-to-speech model developed by Collabora. View the full article

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending the Web Engines Hackfest, hosted by Igalia at their offices in A Coruña, and also sponsored by my employer, Collabora, Google and Mozilla. It has grown a lot and we had many new people this year. View the full article

What HDCP is, and why supporting HDCP in Weston is justified in both an economical and technical context. View the full article

Recently, Sean Paul from Google's ChromeOS team, submitted a patch series to enable HDCP - or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection - support for the Intel display driver. View the full article

Why udisks2 and polkit are the way they are View the full article

Here at Collabora, we trust our people to work remotely, we give them full responsibility for their output, and we believe it helps creating an even stronger internal culture and comes with some other positives. View the full article

The focus in 2022 was on maturing the Wayland driver and keeping up to date with the Wine upstream internal changes, which involved updating it for the latest internal driver APIs, and making preparations to support WoW64. View the full article

We first announced our work on the driver last December, and posted an update earlier this year. We are now happy to announce a second update for this driver, adding several major features which increase its scope and utility. View the full article

It has been just over a year since we first announced our effort to implement a Wayland driver for Wine. Here's a recap of what has been done since then to improve both the functionality and stability of the driver. View the full article

2023 was a great year for the Wayland driver for Wine. After several merge requests, many people are now already able to use the latest Wine release to enjoy some of their favorite Windows applications in a completely X11-free environment! View the full article

Two months ago we announced a first proposal for a Wayland driver for Wine, the compatibility layer for Windows applications. Here's an update on this effort, which contains more details and instructions for building and running the Wayland driver. View the full article

It is with great pleasure that we announce the availability of WirePlumber (the PipeWire session manager) version 0.3.0. This release brings support for desktop use cases and is a working drop-in replacement for PipeWire's example session manager. View the full article

Today marks a very exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, and with it comes WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire! Under development by Collabora since 2019, WirePlumber has now entered the linux desktop space. View the full article

An in-depth look at WirePlumber, the modular and extensible session manager for PipeWire that brings advanced device management, policy control and security enforcement capabilities. View the full article

With the upcoming 0.5 release, WirePlumber's Lua scripts will be transformed with the new Event Dispatcher. More modular and extensible with very little redundant processing, they will look and feel completely different. View the full article

Event Dispatcher, part of the upcoming WirePlumber 0.5 configuration system refactoring, is a custom PipeWire event scheduling mechanism designed to address many of the fundamental issues in WirePlumber. View the full article

This second post in the Tyr series dives deeper into GPU driver internals by using the Vulkan-based VkCube application to explain how User Mode Drivers (UMDs) and Kernel Mode Drivers (KMDs) work together to execute GPU workloads. View the full article

Until now, no Valhall devices (Mali-G57, Mali-G78) ran mainline Linux - whilst this made driver development obviously difficult, there’s no better time to write drivers than before the devices even get into the hands of end users. View the full article

The lineup of great virtual conferences continues this week with the 2020 edition of X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC), the leading event for developers working on all things Open graphics, including the Linux kernel, Mesa, DRM, Wayland and X11. View the full article

The fall conference season continues next week with the X.Org Developer's Conference, taking place from October 17 to 19 in A Coruna, Spain. Sponsored by Collabora, this event brings together developers with an interest in open graphics and is free to attend. View the full article

XDC kicks off October 9 and we have 7 talks to share with the community! Join us as we share the latest news on open source graphics. View the full article

Many thanks to Google for recording all the XDC2017 talks. To make them easier to watch, here are direct links to each talk recorded at XDC2017. View the full article

The 2017 X.Org Developer's Conference kicks off today in Mountain View, California, and along with Collaborans attending & presenting, we're delighted to announce the first ever Collabora XDC Happy Hour! View the full article

Sponsored by Valve, this latest release of the Open Source project which enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR, brings the largest amount of changes yet, with many new features and architectural improvements. View the full article

How the use of Yocto and OpenEmbedded helps corporations migrate to free software. View the full article

We're delighted to be one of the 33 new members of the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) Alliance, a group dedicated to accelerating interoperability of video streaming solutions and fostering collaboration with industry leaders to achieve lower latency internet video transport. View the full article

This week, Collabora is at the YouTube Device Partner Summit in Tokyo showcasing our ongoing work with YouTube, notably on their TV app and the RDK platform, which has resulted in the RDK's integration as a core platform for Cobalt development. View the full article

Today, Imagination Technologies announced they are now using Zink for full OpenGL 4.6 support. This is the first time we've seen a hardware vendor trust Zink enough to completely side-step a native OpenGL driver and use it in a shipping product. View the full article

I recently went to XDC 2019, where I gave yet another talk about Zink. I kinda forgot to write a blog-post about it, so here’s me trying to make up for it… or something like that. I’ll also go into some more recent developments as well. View the full article

There's a lot that has happened in the world of Zink since my last update, so let's see if I can bring you up to date on the most important stuff, including upstream development, support for OpenGL 4.6 & GLES 3.1, and more. View the full article

There's been quite a few updates to Zink, an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan, since I last wrote about it. Here's an overview of the recent changes, as well as an exciting announcement! View the full article

Welcome to your weekly dose of Armbian insights. From thermal management to industry trends, here's what the community is talking about this week. GitHub Highlights GitHub highlightsWeekly Armbian development highlights including expanded board support for DshanPi A1, Raspberry Pi kernel updates to 6.16, and build system improvements.Armbian blogMichael RobinsonHands-on ! Self-host your photos with Immich and ArmbianImmich is a sleek, self-hosted alternative to Google Photos offering powerful features like mobile uploads, facial recognition, and full privacy. With Armbian, setting it up on your own device is simple and efficient.Armbian blogInella JoomunTips & tricks …

Open hardware is growing faster than ever and breaking in new ways.http://blog.armbian.com/content/images/2025/12/New_review1.png2025 has been a productive year for the Armbian project. As the Single Board Computer ecosystem continues to fragment and expand, Armbian has consolidated its position as the universal glue holding the open-source hardware world together. Our mission remains clear: providing a consistent, reliable build framework that generates operating system for an increasingly diverse hardware landscape. Hardware diversity and development velocityThe most visible metric of our growth is hardware support. This year, the team successfully integrated 61 new boa…

As the Armbian 25.11 release approaches, development is entering its final phase with emphasis on testing, stabilization, and release coordination. A code freeze will begin on November 20th, limiting merges to critical fixes and release-essential changes only. Following the freeze period, maintainers will have the flexibility to release once standard validation and review processes are complete. Here's an overview of coordination priorities and upcoming milestones. Coordination meetingA brief coordination session will be held before the freeze to ensure alignment: When: Saturday, 8 November 2025, at 16:00 CET / 10:00 EST Where: Release Coordination Event Agenda: Review op…

The Armbian 26.11 release cycle is in its final stretch. November is for stabilizing: fixing regressions, building release images, and testing on as much supported hardware as we can. Since Armbian 26.08, hundreds of contributions have improved the build framework, kernel support, installation tools, hardware compatibility and release automation. Now it’s time to bring it all together and get Armbian 26.11 ready to ship. What’s coming in this releaseDebian Trixie is now the build base. It’s the official build host and the default Docker image. Ubuntu Noble has been removed from release targets, and every image format is now signed. U-Boot 2026.10 is in place on most platf…

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter, your source for updates, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes news from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. Streamlining the ecosystem This past quarter development has taken a significant step forward for Armbian. We've been busy cleaning up and optimizing our codebase, merging over 150 improvements primarily focused on advancing kernel support for Rockchip and Allwinner platforms. A significant secondary effort was dedicated to modernizing the project's infrastructure and build tools, driven largely by a core group of dedicated contributors. Hardware support continues to expand. We're thrilled to introduce …

http://blog.armbian.com/content/images/2025/12/ChatGPT-Image-Dec-8--2025--11_11_38-PM.pngWe’ve added a powerful new Image Flashing Tool to Armbian! You can now browse, download, and flash Armbian images directly to your device’s internal storage or boot media - no external tools required. Everything happens seamlessly inside armbian-config, making installation and re-installation faster, safer, and easier than ever. Key featuresModule pulls data from the official download infrastructure JSON stream and uses simple and robust components to provide a seamless "search & flash" experience. 1. Interactive image browserFinding the right image is now significantly easier. Fo…

The easiest way to get Armbian onto your board just got easier. In Armbian Imager 2.5, you set up a board by answering a few simple questions, and Imager double-checks your storage right before it writes. Settings now has a page of its own, and the app speaks Greek and Serbian too. Armbian Imager 2.5 in four minutes: the real app, from start to finish. Set up your board with a few answersA first-boot profile writes your network, user account, SSH keys, language and time zone onto the card, so the board is ready to use the moment it boots. In 2.5, New profile walks you through setup one question at a time: how the board connects, who logs in, which language and time zone t…

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. This week: the desktop installer in armbian-config has been rebuilt from the ground up tiered installs, clean uninstalls, and snap-free native browsers across all architectures. Armbian Imager 2.0 is out, rewritten interface and flashing engine, with boards that boot already configured (username, Wi-Fi, timezone) and byte-for-byte write verification. And the NanoPi M5 becomes the first RK3576 board to boot end-to-end from UFS on mainline U-Boot, with no proprietary image in the loop. …

http://blog.armbian.com/content/images/2025/12/holiday1-1.pngFrom major kernel milestones to expanding our support for the latest ARM and RISC-V hardware, 2025 has been a year of growth and grit for Armbian. As we wrap up the final commits of the year, we’re looking back with gratitude at how far this project has come. The holiday season is our favorite time to reflect on the power of open source - where a global community comes together to make hardware work better for everyone. Thank you for being part of our story this year. Happy Holiday Hacking! …

http://blog.armbian.com/content/images/2026/01/coverleter.pngWelcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. http://blog.armbian.com/content/images/2026/01/image-2.pngJoin Armbian at embedded world 2026. Meet us in Hall 3, Booth 3-556 (Seeed Studio), where we’ll be showcasing the Armbian build framework and how it powers reliable, production-ready Linux for ARM devices. FriendlyElec’s NanoPC T6 Plus: The flagship edge computing powerhouse and media stationThe NanoPC T6 Plus, powered by the performance-optimized Armbian OS, is your …

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. The past two months have been particularly active for the embedded ecosystem. At EMBEDDED WORLD 2026, developers, hardware vendors, and open-source communities gathered to showcase the latest innovations shaping the future of embedded computing. In parallel, the Armbian project continues to evolve with new releases, expanded board support, and ongoing improvements to the build framework driven by the contributions of its global community and the growing demand for reliable Linux on AR…

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. Armbian has released images based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon the latest long-term support base. As always, Armbian applies its own platform-optimized kernel, board-specific patches, and tested drivers on top so what you get is a clean, stable foundation across SBCs, PCs, and cloud environments, with no Snap packages, fully compatible with the Ubuntu ecosystem, and no surprises. SPONSORED …

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. Armbian 26.8 brings a major shift to the ecosystem, focusing heavily on rebuilding and refining the core tools users interact with every day. Anchored by the Linux 7.1 kernel across the tree, this milestone release introduces three major overhauls: a redesigned armbian-install utility featuring expanded boot topologies and standalone bootloader flashing, the all-new Imager 2.0, and standardized UEFI ISO images for seamless deployment across desktop and minimal environments. Paired wi…

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. The upcoming Armbian release 26.08 will be based on Linux 6.18 LTS, giving users the benefits of a long-term support kernel with improved hardware compatibility, security updates, and ongoing upstream maintenance. This provides a solid foundation for future development while keeping systems stable and reliable. SPONSORED …

Welcome to the latest Armbian newsletter! This development cycle brings a massive wave of progress across the entire ecosystem, packed with broad new board enablement, major platform maturation, and essential tooling upgrades. Highlights include: Extensive Board Enablement: Expanding support across multiple SoC families—including the EasePi R1, Pine64 Quartz64 Zero, ArmSoM CM7s IO board, Boardcon EM3588, Skysi X5 laptop, Banana Pi BPI-M4, Qualcomm Lenovo Legion Y700 Gen 4, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, Altera Agilex 5 SoCDK, Banana Pi R3 Mini, Firefly AIBOX-K3, Radxa Rock 2A/2F, and Anbernic handhelds like the RG Rotate. Bootloader & Kernel Modernization: A sweeping refresh m…

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. JetHome boosts Armbian CIJetHome (Shenzhen JetHome Technology Co.) donated a build server for Armbian. The server compiles Armbian images, kernels and U-Boot packages. Thank you, JetHome. HW Specifications CPU 2 × Intel Xeon Gold 6148, 80 threads Memory 384 GB Storage 3.84 TB SSD, plus 20 TB of disk Network 2 × 1Sponsored Github HighlightsThis week’s work centers on Rockchip platform maturation, kernel and toolchain modernization, and board-level enablement across vendors. Rockchip r…

The first quarter of 2026 has been a period of significant technical consolidation for the Armbian project. Driven by the v26.02 (Goa) release cycle, the project has focused on three core pillars: aggressive framework refactoring, the stable rollout of the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel, and the maturation of the Armbian Imager utility. Core Framework RefactoringA primary objective this quarter was the reduction of technical debt within the armbian/build repository. The development team initiated a systematic cleanup to improve build reliability and maintenance. Toolchain Optimization: Through a series of pull requests, including #9218, #9252, and #9256, significant "dead code" wa…

Rebuilding the tools you actually touchKernel 7.1 across the tree, a rewritten installer, Imager 2.0, and UEFI ISO images Three rewrites in one cycleMost releases are a long list of small improvements. This one had three larger pieces landing at roughly the same time, and all three touch parts of Armbian that people use directly rather than parts they only read about in changelogs. The installer was rewritten. Armbian Imager reached 2.0. And our CI moved out of the repository it had outgrown into one built for the job. None of these were planned to coincide; they simply reached the point where postponing them again would have cost more than doing them. The installer rewri…

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. Armbian v26.5.1 delivers another strong round of improvements across the project, focusing on expanded hardware support, desktop and userland refinements, build framework modernization, and infrastructure enhancements. This release introduces new board images and platform updates, improves Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute" integration, refines Bianbu desktop support, adds firmware and driver updates including AX210 wireless support, and continues ongoing work to strengthen the build system, CI …

This week, we spotlight the latest progress surrounding the Armbian 25.11 release. Development continues at a steady pace, with new board enablement work, kernel refinements, and package updates rolling in from contributors across the community. From single-board computers powering homelabs to lightweight systems deployed at the edge, Armbian 25.11 aims to deliver a cleaner, faster, and more reliable experience. If you're upgrading existing installations or preparing images for new hardware, this release ensures that your boards stay efficient, secure, and ready for whatever you build next. v25.11 Improving the base, unlocking new optionsThanks to our amazing community an…

This week in Armbian: We're gearing up for the 25.11 release with a code freeze approaching November 20th, while development continues with new board support and kernel updates. We're also exploring the JetHub D1+ as a professional automation solution, understanding safe operating temperatures for SBCs, and highlighting the critical role of SPI flash in modern single board computers. Here's what's new: Armbian 25.11 release is comingArmbian 25.11 code freeze begins November 20th. Maintainers should test boards, resolve critical issues, and join the coordination meeting on November 8th.http://blog.armbian.com/content/images/icon/favicon-25.icoArmbian blogIgor Pecovnikhttp…

Diagnosing System Issues and Getting Support with ArmbianmonitorArmbian is a lightweight operating system based on Debian/Ubuntu, highly optimized for single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, and many others. When facing system problems on an SBC running Armbian, the built-in utility armbianmonitor is an essential diagnostic tool. It quickly gathers crucial system data, making troubleshooting faster and more accurate for both the user and the community providing support. Key Diagnostic FunctionsThe primary use of armbianmonitor is to generate real-time performance and system configuration reports. By running the command without any arguments, you ge…

Single board computers running Armbian offer incredible flexibility and power, but like any mini-computer, they can occasionally hit a snag. When your trusty SBC goes quiet or acts erratically, a systematic approach to troubleshooting can save you hours of frustration. Here are some fundamental steps to get your Armbian-powered device back on track. 1. The power supply: often the culpritBefore you dive into complex software diagnostics, always, always check your power supply. Undervoltage is perhaps the most common cause of instability, random reboots, and even failure to boot on SBCs. Avoid cell phone chargers: While many cell phone chargers feature a USB output and prov…

Why thermal management is non-negotiable for modern SBCsBy Michael Robinson As Western Europe endures severe summer conditions with climate monitors at the Copernicus Climate Change Service reporting unprecedented regional heatwaves and extreme highs stretching across the continent ambient indoor conditions are testing the limits of self-hosted edge hardware. In unconditioned workspaces, home server racks, and industrial enclosures, rising ambient air temperatures erode the thermal headroom that single-board computers (SBCs) rely on. Modern System-on-Chips (SoCs) such as the Rockchip RK3588, Allwinner, and Broadcom platforms integrate high-performance CPUs, GPUs, and neur…

Armbian builds for hundreds of boards. A kernel bump that is clean on one SoC can leave another unbootable and no build log will tell you. So there is a rack, and the rack boots them. Compiling is not evidence. A kernel that builds, packages that install, an image that flashes — none of it proves a board comes back after reboot. Armbian supports a very large number of boards across a dozen vendors and twenty SoC families, maintained largely by volunteers who each own one or two of them. The failure mode that hurts is not a broken build. It is a change that builds perfectly and quietly bricks the boot path on hardware nobody happened to have on their desk that week. The au…

Dear Armbians, I'm thrilled to announce the launch of this digest for our amazing community. For newcomers, Armbian is a lightweight Linux distribution that breathes life into ARM-based single-board computers, transforming tiny, affordable boards into powerful servers, workstations, and IoT devices. This newsletter is our way of keeping you in the loop, sharing the latest releases, celebrating community contributions, and diving into the technical insights that power your projects. Whether you're a tech enthusiast or just getting started with your first Orange Pi, there's something here for you. Thanks for being part of this incredible journey! Igor Armbian proj…