sven-ola

Hu? In difference to Spacemit 6.6.99, the 6.18 kernel has no bcmdhd included. For that reason I put in an adapted version of bcmdhd in a DKMS, installed via a source deb from my repo on codeberg.org/sven-ola. B/c DKMS needs a compiler on the board, the edge image is larger than current image. Code quality of bcmdhd is questionable so it probably never make it into the official Linux tree, but it works (at least on my board with my image). HTH // Sven-Ola

I think I've completed all tasks. Thus the OpiRV2 PR now waits for a team member to press the [merge] button probably.
 
@maxsub I compiled 6.6.99 kernel on my board with 2Gb RAM once. Needed 3 hours and a decent swap file. HTH // Sven-Ola

Hello @Malay! No need to raise your voice. Anyhow - thanks for the feedback. The missing HDMI audio has a deeper reason: the communication with the Realtime-CPUs does not work. Background: HDMI audio needs a special DMA: adma, that in turn is supported by the rCPUs (the extra Cores running the real-time-OS from esos.elf) and that does not communicate correctly via rpmsg currently. Not sure why and also not sure if this is true with the other RiscV/Spacemit boards.
 
The 2280 M.2 slot works, I am pretty sure. If you need a running Armbian *with* HDMI audio, grab the orangepi-rv2-ky branch from my repo. It's older and I use it to compare working vs. non-working currently.
 
Also, there's a reason this has no pull request to Armbian/main: it's work-in-progress. 
 
LG // Sven-Ola

Have solved another todo: grab overlay *.dtbo from Ky/Xunlong. There is still some quirks with SD/TF read/write speed (UHS / 1.8v mode). Also applied for Armbian maintainership on orangepirv2 in advance.
 
Had some experiments with that M.2 to PCIe adapter I recently got. That oversized thing is an older Radeon with an Opi RV2 mounted on top. That does not work (no, card is so old it does not require extra 12V). Second image is a even older Nividia Geforce, That one shows up with "lspci" but does not work b/c no RiscV drivers (that's expected). Next ist an TP-Link / Aquantic 10 GbE Ethernet card. That one works, even without that extra power supply from the PC next to it. Not sure, if the Spacemit CPU can handle the ten gigs... Last image: the 2280-to-PCIe adapter with the eternal SATA power feed cable.
 
LG // Sven-Ola  

If inserted, SD is booted first. If not inserted or SD read err, NOR flash is booted. NOR flash in turn boots from lower 2280 NVME. I have added boot-from-upper 2230 NVME to uboot. To install
Boot via SD. Log in as root. Start armbian-install Select 7 Install to MTD Put fresh image to NVME via dd of=/dev/nvme... Eject SD, press [reset] If anything is wrong, start over with 1. Boot via SD. I am not sure wich NVME (upper or lower?) is used first.
 
Note: If you put the same image to both NVMEs and insert SD, you may have up to three ext4 partitions with the same UUID in the box. So on reboot it is very unclear which of the three ext4 is used as root. Check with df -h /. If necessary, you can use uuidgen from uuid-runtime package and tune2fs -U as well as nano to change extlinux.conf for a different ID.
 
HTH // Sven-Ola

@armfan you start mixing instructions from Xunlong, SpacemiT, and Armbian. That will not work probably. The SoC is able to boot from SD, eMMC, and MTD (in that order). With Armbian started, you can use armbian-install to write u-boot to MTD (which is Memory Technology Device aka the kernel device for SPI flash and other flash mem). That Armbian u-boot is able to indirectly boot from NVME. Or via USB but only with manual u-boot commands you can type into the UART console, see discussion on OpiR2S booting in this thread.

Hello @brunorro, I have uploaded two images to https://privat-in.de/ (navigate to downloads, grab Armbian*.img). Simply post findings here.
 
The "edge" image is rather unstable, e.g. my NVME gives a read-error while working fine with "current", while a Mediatek Wifi card seems to work. Probably no easy task, could be anywhere in the IOMMU - DMA - PCIe triangle. The images are compiled from https://github.com/sven-ola/armbian-build/tree/orangepi-rv2 kernel with defaults plus switched on every Mediatek Wifi driver module. Here's my Todo for ref (+ marks ok):
 
To be merged
+ Boot from SSD (upper+lower)
+ SPI NOR flash boot / install
+ SD/TF speed too slow (15mb/s)
- Check SD UHS in uboot speed limit
+ Brcm SDIO wifi not working
- Armbian edge: Brcm SDIO Wifi
- Armbian edge: PCIe NVME IOErr
+ Bluetooth not working
- RTL ethernet (2.5gbit R2V board?)
- Ky overlay dtbo's missing
- Focaltech touch driver from Ky?
- Ky MIPI/CSI cam modules
- What is that realtime r_uart?
- GPU? USB2-OTG? USB3? Sound?
Personal wishlist:
- Device-mapper / dm_era missing
+ Mediatek PCIe wifi modules
- PCIe adapter: Radeon GPU test
 
Ah, yes. OpenWrt is on the Ky list of supported systems. I have a personal history on that too. While getting rid of systemd may be not that difficult (see Devuan) exchanging libc is another beast probably.
 
LG // Sven-Ola

Hello @brunorro. Yes, sometimes people are hacking badly. I have it working again after restarting with Armbian/Spacemit: u-boot starts, onboard BT and Wifi works, SD card is again reading with 80mb/s, transfer u-boot and SBI to MTD via armbian-install works (MTD boot is required for starting from SSD), both M.2 slots can boot from NVME. 
 
Sadly, the Broadcom SDIO wifi driver is a smoking mess. This driver needs heavy porting so its not available with linux-6.18 / edge currently.  Are you willing to test anyhow? I can provide a 6.6.99 Trixie image for download if you ACK. There are always things that I may have overlooked such as USB, HDMI. All those little things I have not tested, I' on UART currently.
 
LG // Sven-Ola

All clear for the PCIe MSI: it is something with that Intel 7260 card. Today, I got two other M.2 Wifis: MT7922 and RTL8822ce, both seem to work on current and also on edge. Thus, I consider this as a success. Here's some screen blurb.
// Sven-Ola

PCIe MSI is not working. At least with an Intel iwlwifi M.2 card. For that reason, I investigated the differences between the Xunlong KY tree and the Armbian Spacemit Tree. B/c loading the "official" 552kb esos.elf seems to work (even if the Ky version is only 104kb) on the OrangePi RV2, I started to backport Xunlong changes to Armbian/Spacemit family.
 
Newer kernel, but no luck with that MSI. There should be a DMA-transfer-complete interrupt at the end of the firmware upload. Card is working in my PC. MSI is working on OpiRV2 with NVME. Current status: board runs with spacemit-family kernel, but some minor Does-Not-Work yet: LED, onboard Wifi+BT and I need to check that special RTL eth...
 
LG // Sven-Ola
 
Edit: Pic it or it didn't happen. RV2 underside with WIfi card.

As a followup: hardware crypto is damn slow on the Ky / SpacemIt platform, at least for default LUKS block encryption with AES. This probably also affects the Banana Pi F3 image.
 
With default sector-size of 512 byte, HW-AES is 5 times slower than SW-AES, while cryptsetup benchmark reports 5 times faster.
 
Main reason: block size. With sector-size of 4096 LUKS is reasonable fast. Also there is leftover debug (cannot be switched off) and a small bugs in the driver that triggers SW crypto fallback after HW crypto succeeds. Patches: https://github.com/sven-ola/armbian-build/tree/orangepi-rv2/patch/kernel/ky-current
 
Best // Sven-Ola 

Today investigated, why BCM Bluetooth was not working with my image. What a rabbit hole 🙄 Also added OrangePi R2S board. Smaller brother of RV2 (I have no board but it's probably working). 
 
For the Bluetooth: everyone is obviously happy to hack the BCM firmware file instead of implementing bcm init into hciattach. The brcm_patchram_plus firmware hacking tool was added for this arch and that arch as a binary under BSP for different boards. Not very Debian-style. I grabbed the working source, compared to the one avail in Android AOSP and added it to my branch, added lib6-dev-riscv64-cross to the Docker image and now have a working image with BT.
 
LG && HTH // Sven-Ola

Hey! Got it up and running - I have an Armbian SD card image based on the source trees found on https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong. Since I am a newbie to Armbian, please accept my apologies for beginner errors. Here's what I currently got on my UART:
 
root@orangepirv2:~# uname -a Linux orangepirv2 6.6.63-current-ky #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Mar 18 02:29:27 UTC 2025 riscv64 GNU/Linux root@orangepirv2:~# cat /etc/os-release PRETTY_NAME="Armbian-unofficial 26.02.0-trunk trixie" NAME="Debian GNU/Linux" VERSION_ID="13" VERSION="13 (trixie)" VERSION_CODENAME=trixie DEBIAN_VERSION_FULL=13.2 ID=debian HOME_URL="https://www.armbian.com/" SUPPORT_URL="https://forum.armbian.com" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://www.armbian.com/bugs" ARMBIAN_PRETTY_NAME="Armbian-unofficial 26.02.0-trunk trixie"  
This is not ready for prime time now. Needs a bit cleanup b/c I pulled in binaries and private project stuff not meant for armbian-build. Currently resides in this fork https://github.com/sven-ola/armbian-build/tree/orangepi-rv2. If you want to give it a try: it's compile.sh opirv2 after checkout. I've also managed to boot from the top 2230 M.2 SSD but this is also handmade (I'm pretty sure there is a script in here that copies the SD card boot blobs to SPI flash, will try before doing the MR).
 
Best // Sven-Ola

In the meantime, I spotted the pending MR from https://github.com/tmshlvck for this in the Pull Request Backlog. There are a number of issues with that, besides that it's very similar. Adding *.deb from xunlong without review is (mmm), better stay away from this. I'm not sure if the camera *.json is required. Not anything from the xunlong tree needs to be copied probably.
 
I cleaned out my version (see https://github.com/sven-ola/armbian-build/tree/orangepi-rv2), but while this is open since October, I postpone to trigger another MR on that issue.
 
My goal is: boot from upper 2230 SSD and use lower M.2 for Wifi (there are cheap Mediatek 3-band Wifi cards with 2280 adapter). If anyone wants similar setup, just checkout my branch from the link above and:
./compile.sh BOARD=orangepirv2 BRANCH=current RELEASE=trixie KERNEL_CONFIGURE=no BUILD_MINIMAL=yes KERNEL_GIT=shallow Write output/images/*.img to SD and boot with that. Use armbian-install to copy boot cfg on MTD. Again copy that *.img to /dev/nvme0n1. Remove SD card, reboot board. While investigating, there are a number of hints that the Ky X1 is in fact a SpacemiT K1 variant. Maybe stripped down, since the RCPU firmware (esos.elf) is much smaller. 
 
I have noticed, that Xunlong is not exactly welcome here. Chinese difficulties with the words upstream and donation probably. I think the hard work is to maintain / port the kernel and u-boot code drops with future versions. On the other hand: this board is cheap,  offers a way to practice with a new CPU arch, and has the expected minimum number of M.2 slots. 
 

 
I'm currently compiling a kernel on that board. ETA 3 hours or so, board is not very fast. Anyhow, temp stays below 80°C if operated upright (above foto). No unusual hotspots, board and RAM seems stable, wifi and ethernet works.
 

 
HTH and LG // Sven-Ola

Hey! Got it up and running - I have an Armbian SD card image based on the source trees found on https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong. Since I am a newbie to Armbian, please accept my apologies for beginner errors. Here's what I currently got on my UART:
 
root@orangepirv2:~# uname -a Linux orangepirv2 6.6.63-current-ky #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Mar 18 02:29:27 UTC 2025 riscv64 GNU/Linux root@orangepirv2:~# cat /etc/os-release PRETTY_NAME="Armbian-unofficial 26.02.0-trunk trixie" NAME="Debian GNU/Linux" VERSION_ID="13" VERSION="13 (trixie)" VERSION_CODENAME=trixie DEBIAN_VERSION_FULL=13.2 ID=debian HOME_URL="https://www.armbian.com/" SUPPORT_URL="https://forum.armbian.com" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://www.armbian.com/bugs" ARMBIAN_PRETTY_NAME="Armbian-unofficial 26.02.0-trunk trixie"  
This is not ready for prime time now. Needs a bit cleanup b/c I pulled in binaries and private project stuff not meant for armbian-build. Currently resides in this fork https://github.com/sven-ola/armbian-build/tree/orangepi-rv2. If you want to give it a try: it's compile.sh opirv2 after checkout. I've also managed to boot from the top 2230 M.2 SSD but this is also handmade (I'm pretty sure there is a script in here that copies the SD card boot blobs to SPI flash, will try before doing the MR).
 
Best // Sven-Ola

Schematics-wise no - at leasts I don't see a diff in the RV2_SCH.pdf. Electrical-wise probably - other traces, so maybe more or less crosstalk, better or worse gnd and such. From a software perspective: this is PCIE-B and C (while A is unused).
That PCIe active state power management seems to be a source of endless pleasure, maybe the NVME vendors all have digested the wrong specs or so. Anyhow: if it works now, it's fine probably.

Success: tested RV2 with GPU on Armbian-noble-nightly. It's a bit hacky but should work. I created a mirror of the relevant packages from Spacmit/Bianbu. Only packages with source, specific to k1x / video / gpu plus chromium. Mirror project is here, in case you want to mirror yourself or miss a package: https://codeberg.org/sven-ola/spacemit-mirror
 
After getting up Armbian-noble-xfce4-nightly on your Spacemit/K1 board (that includes Ky X1)
Add mirror repo to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sven-ola.sources (Note: this is experimental) Types: deb deb-src URIs: https://privat-in.de/armbian Suites: noble Components: main Signed-By: /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sven-ola.gpg  
Get my repo key with  wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sven-ola.gpg https://privat-in.de/armbian/key.gpg Give the mirror some weight, add an /etc/apt/preferences.d/sven-ola file Package: * Pin: release o=Sven-Ola Pin-Priority: 1000  
Install GPU support  apt-get update apt-get install img-gpu-powervr apt-get dist-upgrade Note: this will downgrade mesa-25.x to mesa-24.x from Bianbu/Spacemit
Install a Wayland-enabled GUI (tested: gnome) apt-get install gnome-core systemctl disable lightdm If asked, select gdm from gnome instead of lightdm from xfce4.
After rebooting, click on your user, then stop and select Gnome with the lower right gearwheel icon.
I also installed glmark2-es2-wayland to check if that runs. It shows 417@800x600 which is faster than software mesa... 

Success: tested RV2 with GPU on Armbian-noble-nightly. It's a bit hacky but should work. I created a mirror of the relevant packages from Spacmit/Bianbu. Only packages with source, specific to k1x / video / gpu plus chromium. Mirror project is here, in case you want to mirror yourself or miss a package: https://codeberg.org/sven-ola/spacemit-mirror
 
After getting up Armbian-noble-xfce4-nightly on your Spacemit/K1 board (that includes Ky X1)
Add mirror repo to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sven-ola.sources (Note: this is experimental) Types: deb deb-src URIs: https://privat-in.de/armbian Suites: noble Components: main Signed-By: /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sven-ola.gpg  
Get my repo key with  wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sven-ola.gpg https://privat-in.de/armbian/key.gpg Give the mirror some weight, add an /etc/apt/preferences.d/sven-ola file Package: * Pin: release o=Sven-Ola Pin-Priority: 1000  
Install GPU support  apt-get update apt-get install img-gpu-powervr apt-get dist-upgrade Note: this will downgrade mesa-25.x to mesa-24.x from Bianbu/Spacemit
Install a Wayland-enabled GUI (tested: gnome) apt-get install gnome-core systemctl disable lightdm If asked, select gdm from gnome instead of lightdm from xfce4.
After rebooting, click on your user, then stop and select Gnome with the lower right gearwheel icon.
I also installed glmark2-es2-wayland to check if that runs. It shows 417@800x600 which is faster than software mesa... 

Success: tested RV2 with GPU on Armbian-noble-nightly. It's a bit hacky but should work. I created a mirror of the relevant packages from Spacmit/Bianbu. Only packages with source, specific to k1x / video / gpu plus chromium. Mirror project is here, in case you want to mirror yourself or miss a package: https://codeberg.org/sven-ola/spacemit-mirror
 
After getting up Armbian-noble-xfce4-nightly on your Spacemit/K1 board (that includes Ky X1)
Add mirror repo to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sven-ola.sources (Note: this is experimental) Types: deb deb-src URIs: https://privat-in.de/armbian Suites: noble Components: main Signed-By: /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sven-ola.gpg  
Get my repo key with  wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sven-ola.gpg https://privat-in.de/armbian/key.gpg Give the mirror some weight, add an /etc/apt/preferences.d/sven-ola file Package: * Pin: release o=Sven-Ola Pin-Priority: 1000  
Install GPU support  apt-get update apt-get install img-gpu-powervr apt-get dist-upgrade Note: this will downgrade mesa-25.x to mesa-24.x from Bianbu/Spacemit
Install a Wayland-enabled GUI (tested: gnome) apt-get install gnome-core systemctl disable lightdm If asked, select gdm from gnome instead of lightdm from xfce4.
After rebooting, click on your user, then stop and select Gnome with the lower right gearwheel icon.
I also installed glmark2-es2-wayland to check if that runs. It shows 417@800x600 which is faster than software mesa... 

@c0rnelius: Thanks for the info, I'll fiddle with the GPU in the meantime. 
 
@Cristian Apas: that hack above is necessary if you use the Xunlong Ubuntu userspace. They have replaced every hint on the OEM, which includes the GPU driver name. Hack not necessary if we simply use the Spacemit Bianbu Ubuntu userspace.
 
I hacked an image together with this (see my site https://privat-in.de goto Downloads). It has a glmark2 score of 424 (not very fast). This is not for everybody. I compiled a standard OrangepiRv2 Armbian image with a legacy kernel and put in a Bianbu 3.01 minimal userspace as root. Details from my notes:
# Image creation starts with Armbian-Orangepirv2_trixie_legacy_6.6.99_minimal.img Root from https://archive.spacemit.com/image/k1/version/bianbu/v3.0.1/ -> minimal.img -- Default LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8, change: dpkg-reconfigure locales -> en_US.UTF-8 Copy from Armbian: /etc/netplan/10-dhcp-all-interfaces.yaml, /etc/fstab, /boot/*, /lib/modules/*, /etc/modprobe.d/orangepirv2.conf /etc/modules-load.d/orangepirv2.conf Purge spacemit-flash-dtbs (and thereby remove linux-image-6.6.63*) Uploaded this image to https://privat-in.de/ (Downloads)  
First steps after flashing
UART login as root / bianbu
apt-get install parted
parted /dev/mmcblk0 (or /dev/nvme0n1): resizepart 1 100%
resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p1 (or /dev/nvme0n1p1)
apt-get install gnome-core glmark2-es2-wayland
adduser a-new-user
adduser a-new-user sudo
Reboot and login
Click on Terminal, run glmark2-es2-wayland
 
Notes: other Spacemit K1 boards can run Bianbu without any changes, this is exclusively for OpiRV2. Expect oopses at every corner...
 
You can install cinnamon-core and use that. Make sure to run cinnamon under gdm3 b/c starting via lightdm does not work well (e.g. menu open freezes). Also, KDE plasma only with screen artifacts and xfce4-wayland simply exits immediately. No other wayland DE tested...

@sven-ola https://lore.kernel.org/spacemit/20260310161853.3900605-1-gaohan@iscas.ac.cn/T/#t
 
Sometime soon-ish I'll be doing another PR with early SD card and CPU freq scaling support. The above link should at least get you boot from eMMC or NVMe.
 

Looks like the same adjustment that was made for EDGE needs to be done so for CURRENT.

Auto generated images:
 
https://dl.armbian.com/nightly/orangepirv2/Forky_current_minimal
https://dl.armbian.com/nightly/orangepirv2/Noble_current_xfce
 

Good news: this is merged in Armbian main now, many thanks to  @c0rnelius and @Igor for reviewing this. So no more need to grab my fork, just clone Armbian/build:main. I was able to build and quick-test orangepirv2/edge-kernel and this looks fine including Wifi. 
 
There are of course unsolved quirks currently. With edge-kernel, Wayland does not work, we need to use Xorg. And with the current bcmdhd Wifi driver, AP mode is not possible. This is caused by outdated file in armbian-firmware for bcmdhd and may be the same on OrangePi5. There is a mechanism to load a different fw_bcm43456c5_ag.bin (the one downloadable from github/xunlong seems to work).
 
LG // Sven-Ola 

Good news: this is merged in Armbian main now, many thanks to  @c0rnelius and @Igor for reviewing this. So no more need to grab my fork, just clone Armbian/build:main. I was able to build and quick-test orangepirv2/edge-kernel and this looks fine including Wifi. 
 
There are of course unsolved quirks currently. With edge-kernel, Wayland does not work, we need to use Xorg. And with the current bcmdhd Wifi driver, AP mode is not possible. This is caused by outdated file in armbian-firmware for bcmdhd and may be the same on OrangePi5. There is a mechanism to load a different fw_bcm43456c5_ag.bin (the one downloadable from github/xunlong seems to work).
 
LG // Sven-Ola