chall88

> drop them. > drop it. sorry. Someone is dropping something here I'm not sure if support was ever better or downgraded at one point because it never had it's own page on the site, it's just a mention of a device tree file swap under orange pi 5, which is listed as standard. If it's not different enough to warrant it's own page, it's entirely reasonable to think it is supported as much as the orange pi 5, under which it can be found. The max, plus and pro variants all have their own pages. 🤷‍♂️ I do understand how tooling works, as I've spend enormous amounts of time digging through the repo and modifying it. Mix and matching patches, modules, or loaders from other projects where their stuff works , and armbian's doesnt or visa versa, to get full functionality images across for the 6 different sbcs I've got. Often times certain projects will have things like vpu figured out way before other projects.

I learned today that the cpudriver is the default which caps all cores at 480000 and refuses to respond to govenor or maxes or mins. Currently digging through the armbian build system to get the rockchip kernel source info to manually compile the rockchip_cpufreq.ko and I did see that the patchfiles (irrelevant for cpufreq) contained this: - "MAINTAINERS" # constant churn, drop them. sorry. - "Documentation/devicetree/bindings/arm/rockchip.yaml" # constant churn, conflicts on every bump, drop it. sorry. Given the fact that the build system says it's dropped and the forums say it's dropped I only expect support for the 5b to worsen over time. For anyone reading this, It's best to start looking for replacements for armbian for this board. The 5b has been tossed overboard by armbian, and there will be more breaking changes for it like the emmc that noone from the armbian team will care to fix or investigate. For anyone else going down this rabbithole, allow me to save you some time vendor) BOOTDIR='u-boot-rockchip64' declare -g KERNEL_MAJOR_MINOR="6.1" # Major and minor versions of this kernel. declare -g -i KERNEL_GIT_CACHE_TTL=120 # 2 minutes; this is a high-traffic repo KERNELSOURCE='https://github.com/armbian/linux-rockchip.git' KERNELBRANCH='branch:rk-6.1-rkr5.1' KERNELPATCHDIR='rk35xx-vendor-6.1'

I can confirm this is still broken as of 10/18/2025 Currently attempting the overwrite armbian uboot with vendor uboot solution The solution did work. The spl loader files can be found here https://dl.radxa.com/rock5/sw/images/loader/rock-5b/release/ All of the files need to be gathered together, or the file paths adjusted when you run the commands. I pulled the rkdeveloptool from git and built it and put everything else the folder with it. ❯ ./rkdeveloptool ld DevNo=1 Vid=0x2207,Pid=0x350b,LocationID=101 Maskrom ❯ sudo ./rkdeveloptool db rk3588_spl_loader_v1.15.113.bin Downloading bootloader succeeded. ❯ sudo ./rkdeveloptool wl 0 armbian.img Write LBA from file (100%) ❯ sudo ./rkdeveloptool wl 64 idbloader.img Write LBA from file (100%) ❯ sudo ./rkdeveloptool rd Reset Device OK.

I did hook up a serial to it after installing to emmc. It's not lying in theis message. You have to flash it with the RKDEVTOOL in order to ahve any kind of functionality back from the emmc

I loaded the vendor kernel(6.1) one, then I used armbian config to roll back to the 5.10 legacy kernel and then proceeded from there IDK what happened but stuff really seemed to go off the rails with armbian on this specific board variant on the newer kernels

Downgrading the kernel from current or vender to the legacy-5.10.160 makes everything work properly. By everything working i mean the wifi and the emmc, and the install to emmc. I also discovered in my poking around that the current kernel regularly locks up the orange pi5b. It wont even respond to network traffic when it locks up.

I always had the dtb set to 5b I did manage to get it onto the emmc manually by using 2 SD cards 1. manually creating an ext4 on the emmc 2. I installed to SD 3. Installed again on a second SD 4. Booted off second SD 3. Attached the usb to SD reader 3. made a /mnt/old /mnt/new and rsync'ed the entire filesystem over to the emmc 4. adjusted the /boot/armbianEnv.txt on the booting SD card and the fstab on the emmc to point to the UUID of the emmc storage. I cant boot off just the emmc, but this sort of uses the sd card as a springboard to load the stuff in emmc. Anyways, armbian-install doesnt work on the 5b. The part that is failing seems to be the bootloading part. Whatever happens before /boot/armbianENV.txt is loaded, that part's broke for emmc

I have attempted this with the vendor kernels and the mainline kernels, and they both do the same thing. The vendor kernel cannot see the EMMC at all after running updates on it. So that version would kill itself when updated even if it did install and boot off the emmc. The wifi also doesnt work on the mainline, so the options are mainline with no wifi or vendor with no emmc. Install to SD card --> to through setup wizard --> change firmware to 5b instead of 5.--> reboot --> armbian-install --> boot from emmc, system on emmc ---> spends a long time on counting files ---> file transfer screen flashes by in 1 second. --> shutdown ---> boot from emmc. ---> completely dead, the lights on the board never even flash green like they do with an SD inserted This has worked in the past, many many versions ago, but it did not do this when it worked "spends a long time on counting files ---> file transfer screen flashes by in 1 second" Files appear to be there though when mounting the filesystem. Correct uuids in the armbianEnv and fstab I also attempted to just burn it from the sd to the emmc with dd, but that also didnt work How can I load a current version of amrbian onto my emmc for the orange pi 5b?

The issue is lightdm, something is probably misconfigured but I dont have the time to track it down right now Swap it for another display manager like gdm3 and it works I spoke too soon, as soon as I logged in there was no display again Seeing as how gdm worked, i decided to go down the gnome rabbit hole gdm3+ gnome desktop environment works, no other DE or DM worked