laibsch

Thank you @laibsch I unfortunately don't understand @Werner's response, but yours is very helpful, thank you very much!  I will look at trying to add that to my .bashrc or .zshrc I suppose! cheers

I think your real question is why hasn't Rockchip put in the effort to get these drivers into mainline linux?  It isn't the goal of Armbian to be the repository of large amounts of unmaintained code.  The goal is really to bring mainline linux to devices.  But that assumes that everyone else is working to bring various bits and pieces from custom linux forks to mainline linux.  While sometimes it is necessary to temporarily host code that has been ported to mainline, but not yet incorporated upstream, most of the efforts should be to get the code into upstream mainline linux.
 

You will have to uninstall the upstream wireguard as that will remove the dependancy on the non-armbian kernel.

Welcome to Armbian forums. Most of general questions are answered in:
https://docs.armbian.com/
https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Board-Support-Rules/
 
Remove those you will get answers there ...

works great for me in productive environment for 2+ years

This should have been addressed: https://github.com/armbian/linux-rockchip/pull/373
May take a while until an updated kernel is available via apt. You can always build a up-to-date package by yourself using the build framework.

You are right.
I just downloaded something from youtube and assumed it was H264.
When I checked it in VLC in my PC, the codec is: AOMedia's AV1 video (av01)
 
 
I picked another mp4, which I verified in VLC as H264-MPEG4, 720p, and it played with 10% CPU
This test below is with Bookworm XFCE, compositor ON, Linux 6.15.4 with default configuration
 
 
Then I repeat the test with a 1080p H264 mp4. mpv tries to use hardware acceleration, but the mpv is black and there's continuous DRM_IOCTL errors:
 
Then I tried this inside /etc/mpv/mpv.conf
hwdec=drm-prime
drm-drmprime-video-plane=primary
drm-draw-plane=overlay
 
and the 1080p H264 starts playing fluidly with just 40% CPU (compositor off)
 
With compositor on, I get same 40% CPU
 
Same video glitches, with or without compositor, but I am getting hardware acceleration (although there's the hwdec unsupported message)
 
Update: Thank you to all who helped me. I have hardware acceleration again with my opiz3
hwdec=drm is more efficient
extraargs=cma=256 is needed to avoid memory allocation problems and video glitches.
 
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/29202-orange-pi-zero-3/page/26/#findComment-222596
 
 

https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Autoconfig/

I don't have time to work on this right away, so to make sure this does not fall off the radar, I opened a ticket in the tracker.

I cannot verify your claim that Ubuntu "reverted" to Gnome v44.  Noble has v44 indeed.  v46 is not anywhere in a Ubuntu release so my guess is you shot yourself in the foot with some random PPA or whatever repo out there.
 
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/meta-gnome3
 
There is no shortage of boards out in the wild, nobody would think that.  What there is, is a shortage of people willing to fund development, be it users or companies.  Big shout out to those who do and to our volunteer devs, thank you!

No, Armbian has not become a total nightmare.  But your posting all over the place, in several threads here and even Ubuntu ustream trackers with a bunch of unsubstantiated and obviously nonsensical claims IS absolutely a nightmare.  PLEASE STOP!

You make bogus claims faster than anybody can look into them.  What made you think this was related to postgres?  What makes you think Ubuntu downgraded their Gnome in Noble?  Slow down, take a deep breath and stop being all over the place.

Not right at all.  Every SBC that has different hardware configuration requires a different dtb file that describes the hardware to the Linux kernel.  So every SBC needs it's own build ( sometimes dtb overlays can be used to shortcut this).  And similar issues can exist at the uboot level too.  

Maybe, but maybe the issue won't occur then. If you want it reproducable, first for yourself, make a complete image of that USB stick on other large storage device and use that as 'master problem disk'. I have an old PC with 3x 4T HDD Btrfs multidevice formatted for such cases. Btrfs can make reflink copies or do RW snapshots, so easy and fast to create a slightly modified image. There is gddrescue to make initial copy from USB-stick.
 
Also this is a USB-stick in an SBC, all sorts of power issues might also be a root cause.
 
You can use nbd-server and nbd-client to make large/huge images available via network, I do that for my BananaPi M1 (8T HDD).
In the past for Btrfs kernel development itself for example, there was/is? a metadata only imager tool, so in case of a complex filesystem bug, you can share only meta data, the data is actually zeroed/sparse.
 
But you need a good extra Linux computer, Windows exFAT handling makes little sense. Best to also test/use the image with a generic Debian Bookworm/Trixie computer, I use a Armbian virtual machine for such a case, running on RPi4 (if 32-bit) or ROCK5B (64-bit only). They can use NBD (as client). AFAIR you can use the sunxi kernel directly in a KVM, at least did something with a NanoPi-NEO image (same kernel as well).
 

Generally debugging is done through the UART connector: https://debug.armbian.de/

Hello,
 
Using Armbian 23.11.1, I managed to upgrade to 25.5.2 with the hdmi output still working by pinning the version of linux-image-current-sunxi. So right now I have armbian 25.5.2 running with the kernel from 23.11.1 (6.1.63) and everything seems fine so far.

I'll see if I can bisect the linux-image versions to find which one introduced the bug.
 
Also note that apart from the hdmi output not working everything seems ok as I can ssh the cubieboard and use it as a headless machine without any issue.

I also have some oom issues when doing an aptitude upgrade in my opizero w/256 MiB ram. Guess even more on a 128MiB board like yours.
Best to add a swap file to make sure upgrades go without issue.
Grt,

@laibsch since I cannot boot that doesn't seem to be a command in u-boot I can run.
 
Reformatted the card with latest Bookworm Armbian_community_25.5.0-trunk.444_Pinecube_bookworm_current_6.12.23_minimal.img.gz
 
@djurnyBoot and Outputs requested at the end. Let me know if you need anything else. Thanks!

 
U-Boot 2024.01-armbian-2024.01-S866c-P7738-Ha5c2-V1f00-Bb703-R448a (Mar 16 2025 - 04:03:33 +0000) Allwinner Technology CPU: Allwinner V3s (SUN8I 1681) Model: PineCube IP Camera DRAM: 128 MiB Core: 47 devices, 20 uclasses, devicetree: separate WDT: Not starting watchdog@1c20ca0 MMC: mmc@1c0f000: 0, mmc@1c10000: 1 Loading Environment from FAT... Unable to use mmc 0:1... In: serial@1c28800 Out: serial@1c28800 Err: serial@1c28800 Autoboot in 1 seconds, press <Space> to stop switch to partitions #0, OK mmc0 is current device Scanning mmc 0:1... Found U-Boot script /boot/boot.scr 5475 bytes read in 2 ms (2.6 MiB/s) ## Executing script at 41900000 U-boot loaded from SD 176 bytes read in 2 ms (85.9 KiB/s) Load fdt: /boot/dtb/sun8i-s3-pinecube.dtb 12286995 bytes read in 509 ms (23 MiB/s) 11013984 bytes read in 457 ms (23 MiB/s) Found mainline kernel configuration 19691 bytes read in 4 ms (4.7 MiB/s) Working FDT set to 41900000 Kernel image @ 0x41000000 [ 0x000000 - 0xa80f60 ] ## Loading init Ramdisk from Legacy Image at 41c00000 ... Image Name: uInitrd Image Type: ARM Linux RAMDisk Image (gzip compressed) Data Size: 12286931 Bytes = 11.7 MiB Load Address: 00000000 Entry Point: 00000000 Verifying Checksum ... OK ## Flattened Device Tree blob at 41900000 Booting using the fdt blob at 0x41900000 ERROR: FDT image overlaps OS image (OS=0x41000000..0x41a80f60) SCRIPT FAILED: continuing... Card did not respond to voltage select! : -110 No EFI system partition No EFI system partition Failed to persist EFI variables BootOrder not defined EFI boot manager: Cannot load any image => echo $fdt_addr_r 0x41900000 => echo $kernel_addr_r 0x41000000 => echo $kernel_addr_r 0x41000000 => echo $kernel_addr_r 0x41000000 => echo $fdt_addr_r 0x41900000 => echo $kernel_addr_r 0x41000000 => echo $ramdisk_addr_r 0x41C00000 => setexpr abc 1 + 1 => echo "abc=x${abc}x" abc=x2x => fdt header magic: 0xd00dfeed totalsize: 0x6b000 (438272) off_dt_struct: 0x38 off_dt_strings: 0x457c off_mem_rsvmap: 0x28 version: 17 last_comp_version: 16 boot_cpuid_phys: 0x0 size_dt_strings: 0x76f size_dt_struct: 0x4544 number mem_rsv: 0x0 => fdt header get def totalsize => echo "def=x${def}x" def=x6b000x  

Most likely a U-boot problem. Please see https://github.com/armbian/community/issues/39

@ER Samson To help figure out why your unit is stopping you could connect to it via an ssh session and as root run "journalctl -f".  this might catch any error messages just prior to failure. When running with logs in zram, as Armbian does, the last messages in the logs are quite often lost when the system abruptly stops.

Same problem:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 14b0:0206 StarTech.com Ltd. 008-2DR166
 
I've blocked kernel updates via /etc/apt/preferences:
 
Package: base-files Pin: version * Pin-Priority: -1 Package: armbian-bsp-cli-odroidhc4-current Pin: version * Pin-Priority: -1 Package: armbian-firmware Pin: version * Pin-Priority: -1 Package: linux-dtb-current-meson64 Pin: version * Pin-Priority: -1 Package: linux-image-current-meson64 Pin: version * Pin-Priority: -1 Package: linux-u-boot-odroidhc4-current Pin: version * Pin-Priority: -1  

Tried creating an overlay and changing it to; peripheral?
 
 
/dts-v1/; /plugin/; / { compatible = "allwinner,sun8i-h2-plus", "allwinner,sun8i-h3"; fragment@0 { target = <&usb_otg>; __overlay__ { dr_mode = "peripheral"; }; }; };  

Currently trying to follow the manual
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man8/initramfs-tools.8.html#configuration hook scripts
 
I want to include this file:
 
Creating this file:
 
chmod +x include-lcd-bin.sh
 
Then I updated the initrd:
 
Then I checked, and the desired file was included
I will repeat this with the actual armbian OS with plymouth, tomorrow.

SBC Orange Pi Zero V1 is still a popular SBC and is still sold on the market, among other things, because it has an integrated sound card and for this reason, a lot of hamradio operators still buy this model because it allows you to build very compact mobile hotspots without having to attach a USB sound card protruding outside the housing and that is why it is very popular and still sold despite the fact that versions V2 and V3 have been released, so it is not an SBC that has completely gone down in history.

I've some old boards too e.g.
https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-one/
interestingly there is an updated image for it, but that things I remember there are lots of gotcha unlike the whole many generation of incremental improvements between boards that finally evolved into a opi z3.
among the gotchas on orangepi one  and orangepi pc h3 is that it uses a proprietary openrisc chip for power off which back then, if you run poweroff, the cpu will instead become very hot rapidly and you have to pull the usb cable quickly.
today there is this thing crust which i've not yet tried which is deemed to be able to orderly  shutdown the soc
https://github.com/crust-firmware/crust
opi z3 uses a PMIC with its own internal firmware and I think it is comms i2c etc that starts the shutdown process.
 
things are different between the generations (of boards and kernel)
 
---
my guess is to try a new u-boot, it may take doing a build
and the changes may be quite similar to this
https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/8334
https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/8334/commits/49ccbe88bc2ddf31b55ece850d28ef18c6ae8a1a
 
---
 
if you want to venture and experiment with just u-boot alone
here is how I once tried
https://github.com/ag88/1.5GB_Fix_for_Armbian_on_OrangePiZero3
https://github.com/ag88/1.5GB_Fix_for_Armbian_on_OrangePiZero3/blob/main/build.md
 

Don't know where to report this as Armbian bug reporting form refused to accept community supported board, but it may not necessarily be board-specific.
 
When logging the first time there is a message: sed: -e expression #1, char 0: no previous regular expression
 
Generating locales: en_US.UTF-8 _ _ _ _ _ /_\ _ _ _ __ | |__(_)__ _ _ _ __ ___ _ __ _ __ _ _ _ _ (_) |_ _ _ / _ \| '_| ' \| '_ \ / _` | ' \ / _/ _ \ ' \| ' \ || | ' \| | _| || | /_/ \_\_| |_|_|_|_.__/_\__,_|_||_|_\__\___/_|_|_|_|_|_\_,_|_||_|_|\__|\_, | |___| |__/ v25.8 rolling for radxa cubie a5e running Armbian Linux 6.14.0-rc1-dev-sun55iw3 Packages: Debian stable (bookworm) Updates: Kernel upgrade enabled and 2 packages available for upgrade Support: for advanced users (rolling release) sed: -e expression #1, char 0: no previous regular expression Performance: Load: 6% Uptime: 17 min Memory usage: 7% of 1.93G CPU temp: 54°C Usage of /: 15% of 6.7G Commands: Configuration : armbian-config Upgrade : armbian-upgrade Monitoring : htop  
The second login does not show this message.
 
Hope this helps