specs

It seems like the Radxa Rock5B has been downgraded from standard support to community support for the image downloads but not (yet) for the forum. Are the vendor images for the RK3588 and the 6.8.x images the same except for the kernel? (Can I expect to just replace the kernel to switch from the vendor image to the edge image.)

After installing Armbian_23.2.1_Rock-5b_bookworm_legacy_5.10.160_xfce_desktop.img I found a nagging error each start of Firefox. "Failed to read the configuration file. Please contact your system administrator." Looking at internet with Google I found hardly any link referring to linux or armbian, therefore I still don't know which configuration file was actually missing or damaged. The only link I found with armbian in it contained some very obscure editting of some configuration files (just like many proposed Windows solutions). The issue: where does it go wrong? The problem is some configuration clutter somewhere in /usr/lib/firefox-esr. And how to solve? A Windows video showed a user removing and reinstalling firefox. Reinstalling with a blank configuration really does solve this problem (try as root or use sudo): apt --purge remove firefox-esr rm -rf /usr/lib/firefox-esr apt install firefox-esr I guess only users who don't use a minimal image may encounter this problem.

Does the latest version include Andy Yan's HDMI/VOP2 patch? (I believe the downstream patch v1 was dated 14 november.)

PD has advantages when you use the cables at 2A for a long time. But that is typically for charging a phone or a laptop in a short time. With a PD-adapter the power consumption is pretty bad for the Rock5. With a constant Voltage power supply it is only bad in combination with NVMe and good in combination with eMMC. When powered of, without removing the power cable, the Rock5B still uses about 0,5W (slightly worse than a RPI4, which is already bad). When using eMMC the Rock5B uses about 1.8-2W in idle. When you are using a general 30-65W PD adapter make it 2.4-3W in idle (the DC-DC conversion from 20V to 5V is very inefficient, if you have a small and cheap PD adapter this adds to the inefficiency). When using an NVMe you could get the power consumption as low as 4W in idle, with a 12V constant voltage adapter. CPU 0-3: 1200 ( 600 Mhz - 1800 MHz / conservative) CPU 4-5: 816 ( 408 Mhz - 2400 MHz / conservative) CPU 6-7: 600 ( 408 Mhz - 2400 MHz / conservative) GPU : 300 ( 300 Mhz - 1000 MHz / simple_ondemand) DMC : 1560 ( 528 Mhz - 1560 MHz / dmc_ondemand) Here the pcie_aspm (NVMe connection) is set to powersupersave. With the pcie_aspm set to performance and all the cpu and gpu settings to max you get 6W in idle. CPU 0-3: 1800 (1800 Mhz - 1800 MHz / performance) CPU 4-5: 2400 (1000 Mhz - 2400 MHz / performance) CPU 6-7: 2400 (1000 Mhz - 2400 MHz / performance) GPU : 1000 ( 300 Mhz - 1000 MHz / performance) DMC : 2112 ( 528 Mhz - 2112 MHz / performance) The Kingston A2000 might not be the most energie-efficient NVMe, but other brands generally also focus on performance instead of efficiency. The above summary is made by parsing the settings from: /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policyX/ /sys/devices/platform/fb000000.gpu/devfreq/fb000000.gpu/ /sys/devices/platform/dmc/devfreq/dmc/ /sys/module/pcie_aspm/parameters/ (You can also use the sys-tree to quickly change the settings with a script). Ondemand and conservative are generally similar for power consumption in idle mode. Earlier experiences that low power consumption and NVMe are a bad combination is true for the Rock5 as well. PowerSuperSave can not be considered a stable option for all NVMe drives. But still with lowpower solutions NVMe might be preferable to eMMC since it is slightly better protected against data loss. In performance mode, during a compilation, the consumption easily reaches 13W (with NVMe, without large USB users, without much GPU use). (I use a cheap power supply with monitoring to get the general idea of power consumption, not a calibrated solution). Finally you could use a constant power supply of 5V to lower the power consumption in idle. I would not recommend that , I think optimizing for 1.5A at peak performance is better, resulting in 9V or 12V for most cases. (Instead of PD, QC is probably cheaper and more power efficient).

Pressing escape to enter the UEFI, changing the boot order apparantly was the correct option. (Bypassing the armbian-config script). After changing the boot option I had to again issue a root password which probably means the installation is started from zero. Now I need to know if (using the 23.04-legacy image) I can change the kernel to the edge kernel. PS on the 2304 image: that probably can be counted as a success since I was (relatively easy) able to install the system on a NVMe starting with the Radxa SPi image. It would be easier to enable the 'normal' armbian-install script than just uploading and dd-ing the image to the nvme, but that's why it is still labelled as "WiP", I guess. What I want to do soon is decrease the partition size and install an edge image besides the 2304 image, including a recent 6.x-kernel. Any hints on the process are welcome! It seems that just booting the original SD card is not a working method. A new image booted from UEFI/EDK might be an option,

On the danger of sounding very stupid: I downloaded the image Armbian_23.02.3_Rock-5b_sid_edge_6.3.0 and Armbian_23.04_Rock-5b_sid_legacy_5.10.110. With the edge-image I got no display, so that seems a dead end for me. With the legacy-image I could start and I could use armbian-install to update the firmware (the powersupply is 12V fixed voltage) Now I have a booting image on SD and I wonder how I can install the image on NVMe. The only install-option I see is "7 install mtd block" (which I did). After that I expected a need to reboot and choose option 3 or something like that, but the only available option is option 7. I can see the nvme-drive and I can make volumes on the nvme using fdisk, but I don't know how to install the system. The other thing I tried is dd-ing the image to the nvme-drive, but then both nvme and SD-card failed to boot and I found myself rewriting the image on the SD-card. How can I install Armbian on NVMe using the 23.04-image?