It is not early fix, but now it should work as expected on non-vendor kernels https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/10289 Also it works flawlessly on vendor kernel with previous overlay

@flintduval You're absolutely right — thanks for the correction, and consider me happily corrected. The boot ROM on these SoCs also tries SPI NOR (and finally FEL over USB) after SD/eMMC, and this board does carry SPI flash — 16 MB as you say. So my "only microSD or eMMC" was incomplete. That would enable the classic setup Armbian uses on other boards: bootloader in SPI, kernel + rootfs on NVMe → a genuinely SD-free board. One heads-up on the second half, though: U-Boot would also need to learn PCIe/NVMe on this board to load the kernel from the SSD — writing U-Boot to SPI alone doesn't get there. It's not something I'm working on myself right now (my plate is full), but if you feel like experimenting with the SPI, it should be low-risk on this board: the ROM tries the SD slot first, so a bad SPI write is recoverable by just booting from SD. If you do try it, please share what you find here — I'd read that with great interest.

i have r2-pro banana pi with 3568. tell what i need to do?

... or SPI Flash. This board has 16 MB of SPI Flash, so we can try writing the bootloader there.