@Nick_Sl @bickns — the headless build is up (146 MB, pure Debian 13, mainline 6.18.38, SSH from first boot): https://github.com/ut-slayer/orangepi-4a-mainline/releases/tag/v0.2 If either of you gives it a spin, I'd love a short report — what works, what doesn't. No rush and no obligation; even "booted, nothing broke" is useful. @Nick_Sl — you offered to test, so I'm taking you up on it 🙂. Most useful gaps right now: NVMe / M.2 SSD, suspend, and the GPIO header (eMMC and the 4 GB variant were just confirmed by another tester). @bickns — if the board ever leaves the drawer: the analog codec driver works, but mic capture is the one bit I couldn't bench-test (no onboard mic here). With your outdoor-audio project, you'd be the only one who could close that gap. Zero pressure either way. And if you don't mind, I'll add you to the thanks in the repo — testers get named there (JamesCL is already in for confirming the eMMC and the 4 GB variant). Also, early days and no promises: the VPU (hardware video decode) is something I've now started digging into. Thanks both.

That sounds good. I'm not using the jack for mic or output but should be able to check the DSP when things are more tied down with this outdoor-audio project. Will let you know and thanks again on a great job with this board!!

Software complexity is extreme ... And only x86 I would assume, so there is very little of interests for us. It is enough that packages are assembled at different time, so they will have different (bugs &) fixes. Either Ubuntu will get this bug or xtradebs will be fixed. Soon both wil be fixed or both broken .... unless bug is down to the OS level. Where snap will win with its, presumbly, stabilized OS container.

On prebuild images we test video acceeleration within Chromium and it works. Both kernels, Ubuntu Noble / Resolute Gnome, same good or bad on all boards. Others userspace combo might not work and other/all video players we don't even try to cover. Our job is done, when at least one method works OOB. It was integrated. This is not needed anymore. For overlay, I don't know. I think its still needed and it that case, its certanly present. On kernel, where this is needed.

With the official friendlyelec image for Nano Pi M6 (trixie, gnome, 6.1 kernel), I'm getting hardware acceleration with the plain vanilla mpv from Debian: mpv --vo=gpu my.mp4 mpp[2968]: mpp_platform: client 18 driver is not ready! ● Video --vid=1 (h264 1080x1920 59.9998 fps) [default] ● Audio --aid=1 (aac 2ch 44100 Hz 128 kbps) [default] arm_release_ver: g24p0-00eac0, rk_so_ver: 10-616430-r0 mpp[2968]: mpp_info: mpp version: 958803d7 author: Herman Chen 2026-02-26 fix[h265d_rkv]: Fix rkv ref and poc setup overflow Using hardware decoding (rkmpp). AO: [pipewire] 44100Hz stereo 2ch floatp VO: [gpu] 1080x1920 drm_prime[nv12] Everything works wonderfully, and CPU usage is about 25%, compared to 500% for Armbian. Why can't rkmpp be enabled on Armbian to give us harware accel out of the box? @Igor: The overlay link you provided above (mesa-vpu) is broken. And no such overlay exists in the prebuilt images for the Nano Pi M6. Result: still no hardware acceleration for my M6 with Armbian.