SteeMan

How armbian-release is created and maintained is outside my area of knowledge. @Igor Is it as simple as copying armbian-image-release to armbian-release to replace the missing file?

armbian-config is a shell script so it is fairly easy to debug and modify with echo statements to print out what is going on. There is currently no log produced. So if you have decent shell scripting skills debugging shouldn't be too hard.

By default the community builds point to the 'beta' channel, otherwise known as 'nightly' or rolling releases, which have updates constantly. If you want something more stable, use armbian-config to switch to the stable channel, and then you should only get updates quarterly.

None of the builds you are dealing with are Armbian builds. They are all armbian forks and are really not appropriate for discussing in the Armbian forums as it leads to confusion on what is and isn't Armbian. So if you do continue this discussion here, please make it clear that you are talking about non-armbian builds.

@threpwood Since I'm the current maintainer of the Armbian amlogic TV Box builds I may be biased in my response. I will first state the official Armbian position which is that TV Boxes are crap and not supported. (This is often the case and you may find that you purchase something really cheap and it doesn't work with Armbian at all - this can be for any number of reasons, from TV boxes generally have the cheapest components, often two 'identical' boxes will have completely different components, etc). But, to address your original question, between the aml s905x3 and rk3566 I would recommend that you go with s905x3. That CPU is now many years old, which means its support within mainline linux is pretty mature. Whereas the rk3566 is relatively new and the mainline linux support is still being worked on. Also, while armbian has community builds for the older amlogic cpus and the older rockchip cpus (aml-s9xx-box, rk32xx-box, rk3318-box) there is only one community build for the h96-tvbox-3566 which is currently being worked on - other rk3566 boxes will be very hit or miss (but there is active work on getting more supported (search the forums for information). Now having said that, you need to be willing to deal with the limitations of the amlogic tv box builds (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16976-status-of-armbian-on-tv-boxes-please-read-first), which I suspect you are based on the fact that you already appear to be using the armbian amlogic builds for an older box, but I mention here for completeness for others who may stumble across this post. Finally in my basic performance tests the s905x3 show that it is almost twice as fast as the older s905x. But neither is what I would call fast, but for general server type services, they do a fine job. I have an s905x2 box that hosts a few production websites and it is fine for that purpose.

Have you tried to use armbian-config to change the settings?

First off you aren't following the TV box install instructions. You don't use armbian-install with the aml-s9xx-box builds as it will brick your box. But regardless, even if you were following the correct instructions there is a note there: Note: It is not possible to install into emmc on boxes with the s905 cpu The way that the emmc is laid out on the s905 makes it impossible to intall Armbian to the emmc on that cpu. The later varients (s905x, etc) don't have that issue. So you are stuck running off of SD storage.

If you have other SD cards give them a try. These boxes can be very particular in which SD cards they will be able to read from. Especially if the SD card is newer formats that are not supported by these old boxes. I find about half of the SD cards I buy can't be used on these boxes. But also, note if you've read the TV Box FAQ, don't expect to get wifi working. It rarely works on these Amlogic boxes.

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with Armbian. It might be better to post your question somewhere else.

Your extlinux.conf file is wrong. The "fdt" line is separate from the fdtdir line. You don't touch the fdtdir line and need to add the fdt line.

No you need to boot a full armbian from the SD card. If you have an armbian image on the SD card, it should boot from that before booting from emmc.

You can use ddbr. You just need to boot from an SD card so the emmc isn't being used and then run ddbr from the SD card to make the backup.

Yes that looks fine (you didn't include it in your original post) What Armbian packages do you have installed? apt list --installed | grep armbian

What I think you have missed is updating: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list Which if updated to bookworm should install the correct armbian rootfs packages as Werner mentioned.

@Rafael Costa If you want help on this, you should be posting in the thread mentioned above. Those that can help you monitor that thread, not necessarily the whole forum.

At that point you are doing kernel development. There is no reason that the kernel source code being used by Armbian (the vendor branch) supports the features you are enabling. It is very likely that patches from mainline linux will need to be backported to the vendor kernel branch that you are trying to build. This isn't an Armbian issue, but something you would need to do. You are essentially adding features (by enabling kernel feature that Armbian doesn't curently support or test). If you want to go down this path, you should enable items that you need in your kernel config one by one and see which specific features are failing. Again, if you diff your kernel config with the one Armbian uses there are many differences.

So in looking at the diff of your kernel config there is a lot different from base armbian. I'm assuming the image build fine if you don't modify the kernel config file? What are you trying to accomplish? Why are you editing config files?

Please post you full build logs

As of the 24.05 release Armbian no longer uses the package cpufrequtils. It now uses that configuration file directly, and replaces the basic functionality that the package cpufrequtils formerly provided. So the Armbian hardware optimization service reads this file and applies the values to the system, and armbian-config is responsible to modify it.

On boot the system will apply the values from /etc/default/cpufrequtils to the running system (it is done by the armbian hardware optimization service)

You can manually set this info in /etc/default/cpufrequtils

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/16976-status-of-armbian-on-tv-boxes-please-read-first Don't expect wifi to work.

My last comment on this. The sad reality is that what the handful of volunteers that are Armbian produce is on average the best support out there for these boards. Many (I would even say most) of the other SBC builds out there take their code from Armbian and then add on a few things. You talk about 'companies', there aren't any that support these boards. The companies are the board manufacturers and they don't support their own products. You ask why Armbian is here, it is here because people like me have a bit of spare time and want to help and find these boards a fun and challenging hobby. But it is entitled people like you that make me not want to do this. Finally, you have no investment in Armbian thus Armbian owes you nothing. If you were paying for something here you might have a reason for your behavior. But you are using something provided to you for free, as is with no warranty. If it doesn't work then go find something elsewhere that you think is better (and good luck by the way). Or since this is open source you can always fix it yourself.

@holm The board you are using is not supported or maintained by Armbian. It is Community Maintained. That means that no Armbian resources exist to support this board. It is up to people outside Armbian to submit PRs to keep it alive. That is what it means when Armbian says it lacks resources to maintain hundreds of different boards out there. What Armbian provides to you free is infrastructure, automated builds and a forum. It is up to you or others who care about this (or any Community Maintained board) to submit PRs to keep it alive. I'm just a moderator of the forums trying to help. If you really want to complain to someone, instead of complaining to those of us here trying to help you for free (as I volunteer my time to receive the abuse you just gave to me), you should complain to the company that took your money for their board but then don't provide any software support for what they sold you. They just take your money and run, and hope others (like Armbian) will support their hardware without any compensation.

A quick look shows: Current u-boot sets CONFIG_GMAC_TX_DELAY = 1 (I didn't look at history if this has changed over time) (https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/ea722aa5eb33740ae77e8816aeb72b385e621cd0/configs/Cubietruck_defconfig#L11) and there is no patch in Armbian for Cubietruck that changes that value: (https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/main/patch/u-boot/u-boot-sunxi/board_cubietruck) It should be fairly simple to test different values to see if that addresses the problem and submit a PR to Armbian (or to upstream u-boot) to fix