Igor

Thank you. It was never Debian but Armbian (with Debian user space packages) since the day 1 but at some point we had to stop maintaining hw interface / kernel, also Kobol went out of business. When this happens, things starts to fall apart and if you would take our work more serious, you could have this hardware well supported.

You mean Linux kernel related troubles? Documents about progress and problems is scattered around many forums and mailing lists. We are focusing to troubles related to hardware we cover, but there are also general problems we all face. If you have a lot of time, if you are dealing with this daily, you can get a better picture about, but it will be far from complete. I only told you how I see it. If you are talking about build framework documentation, than yes, its not in a good shape. We have reworked framework completely and made a switch several months ago. We had to, even documentation was not completed yet. Person who had to deal with this couldn't afford to continue working on that, while I can't hire a person as users want everything for free. Recently I have started to engage with another person, to put documentation together, but he needs weeks / months to get familiar ... Build framework supports it, but we don't use DOS partition to store DTB files and yes, enabling UART is just editing it and enabling within. Or by make + loading overlays that contains that change. I understand users frustration. This is not a professional support service and there are 1000 x more people that asks questions than those that can answer. This ratio hasn't been changed in past 10 years and it won't. Its a complex world, a lot of time has to be wasted to answer and users (including experts like you) don't care about perspective from the side you are addressing to. Reality looks this way: to answer you, I had to tell my wife and my kids to shut off as I have to focus to answer to someone that is stealing our family budget, to answer everyone that needs help, I can waste all my wake hours every day ... and you are pissed off? Nobody here is responsible for troubles end users have - this is the base of our contract. If 3 days response for hardware that is specifically marked as "not supported" on the project that only provides best effort support via forums is too much, we provide commercial support - which is just one way to respond on violence from people that think we are responsible for the misery and we have to solve their problems. No, we are not. We are in this sh* together. Just we spent 24/7 to work on problem, we pay for most of costs and for most of you this is a hobby. Neither me and many people around here. Scene is also changing. Market is overloaded with cheap hardware that is becoming more and more complicated ... while back in 90" it was a huge privilege and thrill having a root access to some big bad-ass Unix machine. We don't have time for holy wars here, Debian vs Ubuntu vs Arch vs FreeBSD vs ... That part is so not important for the problems we deal with.

IIRC, kernel headers on this (proprietary / private) kernel are anyway broken.

That is correct. Many people already tried to fix this, I also spent few days but more I can't ... but I got information that someone else succeeded and its "just" integration and testing. But there are more problems to be resolved before cheapest WiFi on one board. Perhaps in 23.08, but in free software we can't give promises.

It seems kernel 6.1.y is broken in several places. Use more adult kernel 5.15.y (legacy). We are very close to this scene and are running into many many problems. Also I am desperately trying to improve and enlarge Allwinner section (with no budget and very little help from users side) to fight those already known problems. Elsewhere is just more dust, so I am not sure if you have much luxury of choosing different hardware interfaces. Updating is expensive and hard to do for mainly amateur projects. We would need at least one full time person to keep our documentation on the level you would be satisfied. Depends where this documentation will end. If we limit only on our tools, then this we might be able to polish it on satisfactory level in about a year. Likewise. 🍻 Welcome to Armbian. Please keep in mind that most people that develop and maintain software for you with their private resources don't like to feel any pressure. Don't bump topics. Leave manual configuration. Use armbian-config, system -> hardware ... It should work, but perhaps not with latest kernel / image.

Did you try legacy kernel (5.15.y). With 6.1.y many things are wrong ...

IMO its best to remove this half working Tow-Boot and use boot loader shipped with Armbian. From the chat:

Rescued ... there is something wrong with bootloader on SPI flash. Instructions were updated. You also need to erase SPI flash, then proceed standard Armbian way. Flash to SD media, boot from it, then install to eMMC. We will look deeper once possible: https://armbian.atlassian.net/browse/AR-1787

There is indeed something wrong but I managed to brick my board ...

We have tested VIM3. Are you sure you are downloading correct VIM3? https://www.armbian.com/khadas-vim3/ or https://www.armbian.com/khadas-vim3l/

Please provide link to the exact image. We will check shortly.

I am glad you have asked. We do a lot of testings, but the task is gigantic and not many people understand the sacrifice that is needed: A few people can't test 1000+ different features of a Linux system and especially not on different hardware platform. Here we have unique problem, a lot bigger then any other Linux distribution. Which usually just distribute this (our) work. Since our resources are super limited and most of users help is in reporting and complaining problems (mainly useless doubled information), we have to focus to test basic features only. Which are basic you can see in that testing topic. Automated test system - we are looking for help for years (hiring is not possible) - people that have experiences with this to help us setup automated test infrastructure. Which is the only answer to your questions. Still, when things are tested, our team and budget is way too small to address issues that are found. This is something most of end user are unable to understand. Small testing is happening daily, while this larger testing is happening at each release, 4 x per year, and it costs us weeks of our private(!) time. Time is money and in several decades, your donations will match the time that is lost in one such event. To give you perspective of your question and an some of the "why" answer. As we understand not all images will work and we care about you and your precious time, we provide you several viable workarounds! Older images can be downloaded for years back (https://archive.armbian.com/), you can try to build from sources. It is very much possible that bug has nothing to do with our code. As this is open source, anyone can dig in and if you will fix the bug, you will help everyone, Linux community, not us specifically as other distributions are also using Armbian as a base. Armbian is far from perfect, but gift community receives is IMHO beyond reward that is given to developers that provides you this. Even when you have problem with. We listen to you, but we can't help in real time or before you notice as team is too small. Fixing issues can take a week, a year, perhaps bug will never be resolved, perhaps it already is. People that are fighting thousands of issues found in open source software are scarce resource you should only thanks. We are in this sh* together. https://docs.armbian.com/#what-is-armbian This is Linux / open source. Look into logs, ask on forums (you did), ... good luck in resolving a problem you have with open source software. We help best way possible and advise you to start this way https://www.armbian.com/bugs/

Likewise. You don't drive us, our development.

It was fixed right away by adding a text "1GB version is not supported" as there are no plans to fix this anytime soon. Why? You don't need our help. If not here https://docs.armbian.com/Release_Changelog/ or https://www.google.com/ then https://calendly.com/armbian/consultation Why proprietary kernel images works? https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_FAQ/#why-does-hardware-feature-xy-work-in-old-kernel-but-not-in-more-recent-one Here you can add your share for R&D and for the damages your questions generate.

Download: https://www.armbian.com/nanopi-r6s/ (unofficial WIP support)

Those are developers preview builds, where you can check what works and at some point it will be good enough for some uses cases. In a couple of years, it will be functional on the level of kernel 5.10.y. Download is possible from CI pipeline: https://github.com/armbian/build/releases Boot log: This board is looking for maintainer(s) and (this) forum moderator (contact @Werner).

https://www.armbian.com/radxa-zero2/

https://www.armbian.com/odroid-m1/ - kernel 6.1.y LTS

Just a reminder, if someone wants to fix it.

Many of us are using Armbian not just on ARM single board computers but also on servers (bare metal & virtual). We use our builds since we trust it more then Debian, Ubuntu, not to mention other distributions that are recklessly updating and one ends up as an OS tester and not OS user. Personally I use Armbian Jammy on Ryzen 9 workstation with great success. My primary use case is development / productivity. For the road I used to have 13" Dell notebook which recently suddenly died. It was out of warranty so I had to get something new. After some testings of various devices I settled with 12th Gen Intel i5-1240P powered Lenovo. Then I tried many general purpose distros to see how well they work and all had some (minor) troubles ... We are having UEFI images (common image) since some time, but UEFI nor desktops were fine tuned nor ready for such performance daily driver desktop usage. We were close, but not close enough to just run it. Past two weeks we have been lifting general UEFI support, fixed many bugs and what came out is "Armbian ultimate developers desktop build". - improved support in GRUB (armbian wallpaper) & HiDPI GRUB support - all preinstalled applications are normal apt packages - current 5.15.y kernel, Jammy userland (5.19.y has some strange issues) - snapd is not installed (user can install it) - HiDPI support (automated adjustments on big screen resolutions) - NVIDIA graphics acceleration with proprietary driver (x86 only) - Intel graphics acceleration also works out of the box - preinstalled Google Chrome (x86 only) - preinstalled Microsoft Visual Studio Code (x86 only) - ZFS 2.1.5 ready (apt install zfsutils-linux zfs-dkms) - face unlock works perfectly fine on this laptop - installation to SSD drive to dual boot with Windows 10/11 is supported Armbian classical way by transferring actual live image to the prepared partition via nand-sata-install. All you need to do is prepare spare space on your drive, Windows 10/11 or Linux, UEFI support (most if not all hardware for past 10 years has it). I have tweaked images (XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon) a bit to my personal needs, but making changes is welcome. Nice to have: disk encryption within nand-sata-install, small bug fixing, additional DEs. Currently we have CLI, XFCE, Gnome and Cinnamon. Others are too buggy. https://www.armbian.com/uefi-x86/ https://www.armbian.com/uefi-arm64/ Please report where it works and how (well)!

Samples arrived ♥️ HW looks fascinating, Armbian is yet to be ported so can't comment how good this is in realworld. Its shipped with stock Khadas Ubuntu, kernel 5.4.y, which is good to boot something ... Technical specs at CNX.

If you are running Armbian desktop and you like to use Visual Studio Code, open a terminal and run: sudo apt update sudo apt install code