Jurgen.Schober

Yes, the rock5b work just fine. I also installed the UEFI into the SPI there (I have 2 Rock 5b) - I might want to give the itx a shot installing the UEFI into the SPI one day. There is something in the UEFI image which does not boot from SD; trying to find any docu about that - I came across one article mentioning some HW hack to change the boot order (probably what you described up there). The 5b and itx are quite different (itx is also 10-20% faster with higher clocks and faster RAM) but otherwise once the UEFI is installed, mine run the same OS. Unfortunately to run ACPI one needs a latest OS (Ubuntu 25 or Fedora Rawhide) - I haven't actually tried the mainline Armbian - I run KDE Plasma and while there was a Neon image somewhere most Armbian prebuilts don't run KDE (everytime I post install that, something else breaks). Anyway, I am happy that everything is working now on all my Rock5 boards.

Replying to my own again...UEFI doesn't seem to boot from SD if you don't modify the HW, it does boot from the internal eMMC, though! All you need to do is flash the EDK2/UEFI bios (1.1 at the point of writing) to the internal eMMC and then fix the GPT (I just run GParted or KDE Partition Manager - that asks you a couple of questions and fixes the parition table). After that you can just run the e.g. Fedora Rawhide ARM64 iso and install to the same eMMC (just have the installer "add the OS" - it will not change the GPT or overwrite the bios). After that you can boot from USB, SD, NVME and even a SATA with a m2 sata adapter.

Replying to my own post. ... EDK2 has an UEFI BIOS which runs mainline linux - no custom builds. It supports ACPI and device tree. I run this now with Fedora Rawhide 43 with KDE (6.4 Beta) which runs ACPI out of the box, older kernels work with device tree. I haven't used the latest mainline Armbian but that should work, too (at least the latest mainline image). Rawhide runs mainline kernel 6.15/6.16 (latest build) which supports the SOC + GPU out of the box.

I got a 6.1 noble minimal image installed with a latest kubuntu update to KDE 6. Was quite some work to get this all working. But some thing aren't working (e.g. audio?). 6.12 and later supports a range more peripherals. I tried the non-vendor images but no go. How do I install one of those? (Not using ROOBI, I hacked this to use my own)

How do you install this? I managed to get rid of ROOBI but just flushing the image to an SD (or the emmc) doesn't boot.