TRS-80

I have been wanting to buy one for what seems like months (a year?) now and they have not been able to do a production run due to the supply chain shortages (mainly screens, apparently).  I follow them pretty closely, there was some hope maybe after CNY 2022 but then they announced no they could not source screens after all.
 
So your information is really timely @hexdump, thanks a lot for that. 

Sorry could not make the meeting.  I just read the notes.
 
I am back to work now but locally (almost no travel) so I can have a little time here and there maybe to help with the release somehow.
 
I'll try to hang out in IRC.

Sorry could not make the meeting.  I just read the notes.
 
I am back to work now but locally (almost no travel) so I can have a little time here and there maybe to help with the release somehow.
 
I'll try to hang out in IRC.

Sorry could not make the meeting.  I just read the notes.
 
I am back to work now but locally (almost no travel) so I can have a little time here and there maybe to help with the release somehow.
 
I'll try to hang out in IRC.

I'm building from the armbian-next branch for testing and I'm finding the experience quite unfamiliar and a little annoying.   It does seem faster though.

Orangepizeroplus (H5) built successfully for current, jammy and the image produced worked. I suspect that other flavors will build okay for testing.
but it errored after building the image [] Error occurred [ code 23 at /root/build-armbian/rc/build/lib/functions/logging/runners.sh:134

Orangepi-r1plus-lts (rockchip64 RK3328) built successfully for current, jammy.  No build errors.

Orangepi-r1 (H2) build system failed near the end.  019.000.create_board_package.log
--> 🛠1272: 1319406 - 1319406 - 1319406: ehBE: debug: Running family_tweaks_bsp [ sunxi ]
--> 🧽 1272: 1319406 - 1319406 - 1319406: ehBE: trap: main_trap_handler [ ERR and 1 trap_manager_error_handled: ]
The annoying 6.8 MiB html log file is a pain to parse. 

I guess that the build system enhancement issues will be picked up and dealt with separately and should probably not have bugs logged by SBC testers, or should I be logging bugs?

Can I switch off the time wasting and annoying markdown / html logging behaviour?
I don't want caterpillars, butterflies ants, bunches of leaves and comic explosions that don't make anything clearer and are unnecessary annoyances that don't play nicely with my tools.
LOG_ENABLE_EXTENSION=no, didn't do it.
Is it possible to keep the split .tmp files on error / build fail?

I think we should do exactly the opposite.
As soon as the author realizes that his codebase has begun to create stable images for the family\branch, he can invite the most active members of this group to test and fix bugs.
That is, errors, changes must be made in this branch. While the master should remain stable and not create problems for the current work.

Here's some info on armbian-next status:
- In development since October/2021 (thus 7 months)
- Currently sitting at 189 commits, almost all lib/**/*.sh files are changed.
- More than 17 rounds of manual merges performed manually against master. Sometimes we have 1-2 weeks of delay, but it's mostly master-equivalent. Each round takes 2-5 hours of carefully reviewing every commit that landed on master and maybe rewriting it.
- Huge changes around logging and error control. Errors now stop the build. Logs contain actionable information.
- Rewritten kernel building and packaging. There's no more packaging patches or builddeb hacks. Kernel-headers support cross compiles across all arches. No more byteshift patch. Still needs tuning.
- Completely changed git handling, specially for kernel. This still needs handling of previously git://, now http:// bundle downloading as reported above, and caching.
- Patch hashing is half-rewritten, still needing work. Now same code can both actually patch and produce hashes, making it consistent. "fasthash"
- apt-cacher-ng configuration for local usecase is now under Armbian control.
- 100% working without any external/downloadable toolchains.
- full support for building any arch under any other arch, including "reverse cross-compiles" and running of rkbin/fip x86-only binaries.
- source code is now properly formatted according to shellfmt, and 90% of shellcheck warnings are squashed. A lot remains still.
- 20x faster kernel rebuilds, 2-3x faster full builds due to consolidated make invocations, benefitting from bintree caching as well as ccache.
- most compression points changed to zstd, yielding multicore (de-)compression and thus much faster image building during cache hits.
- full support for DKMS modules, eg nvidia-drivers and ZFS, under any cross compile scenario.
- data channel for metadata communication, config extraction, matrix generation etc by having stdout clean for machine data. logs to stderr.
- per-build TMPDIR affecting and protecting all `mktemp` invocations
- all traps rewritten under a cleanup/trap manager.
- full HTML-based, single-file, full build log artifact. no more output/debug.
- many others I forget.
 
All that said, I've still a ton of stuff pending before this can 100% replace current master:
- EXTRAWIFI-style manual patching of things is not idempotent nor proven working with "fashhash" and probably causes full kernel recompiles, negating previous benefits until fixed.
- (server-based) Caching of warm/cold git bundles, to avoid people downloading 4gb+ of git sources.
- kernel-headers will probably be unified with kernel-sources, since they contain mostly the same stuff.
- extra-buildpkgs is not touched nor run, and safe to assume needs lots of work.
- certain CI-only build ops like "rebuild roofs only" and "build all BSPs" and "build all u-boots" never run so probably won't work.

Some few brave souls like @NicoD, @Rich Neese, and @going have actually tried armbian-next and every single try there's stuff to fix, thanks for trying and reporting.
TL,DR: armbian-next is doing well, thanks. Work continues. It might not be ready for merge, will it ever be? I will keep it rebased as much as possible. There's no pressure. Try it out, and report. Thanks!

 

I've some images, but they're really quite far from usable right now.
Vendor kernel 4.19 I can't get HDMI to work. Everything else works. I'm using it to build Armbian itself and works great with NVMe and the 8gb RAM.
Mainline 5.18-rcX has working HDMI, but no NaNeng PHY, so no PCIe/NVMe, no USB3, and no SATA. tobetter is working, also work in quartz64a and other rk3586/8 will benefit this.
nand-sata-install will not work with this unless I find a way to flash uboot to SPI (and this remove petitboot, but there is no official petitboot recovery from HK yet)
and mainline u-boot is even further away, so little chance of that.
 
 

Yes. I don't think it's even near being merge-able right now, small bugs but are showstoppers for most people, and I can't handle them all by myself in such timeframe, including handling all the Jammy fixes and a dozen rockchip kernels, extlinux, nand-sata-install, etc.
And once merged a whole slew of things will show up (extras buildpkgs, prebuilt, rootfs caching, repo publishing, git bundle stuff, most of the GHA stuff that normal developers hardly ever run).
The concepts behind armbian-next are almost fully realized, but the fruits still have to be collected. Otherwise it seems pointless...
I will keep it rebased as much as possible, so the effort lives on, only without pressure.
Before merge, documentation has to be written too, so that will take a while.
work continues!
 
 

@gounthar - if you are looking for arm laptops for use with linux, then you should also consider arm chromebooks. best supported are the mediatek mt8183 based kukui and the snapdragon 7c based trogdor devices - nearly everything is working for them with mainline with only very few to no patches required and they are available used or new really cheap (by a factor lower than any other arm laptop option). both have 8 cores, 4gb (some 8gb) ram and 64+/-gb fast emmc. performance wise they are above odroid n2 level. if you can get (not easy due to supply issues) or build (there are a few docs with instructions online) a suzyqable you even get features like a serial console on a laptop which you usually never get. the build quality and reliability of such chromebooks is usually way higher as for average sbc's and with mainline on the above mentioned series you get: panfrost gpu support, working suspend/resume and power saving modes, working wifi, bt, sound and for most of them even camera(s). maybe have a look at cadmium: https://github.com/Maccraft123/Cadmium or my linux on arm chromebooks page: https://github.com/hexdump0815/linux-mainline-on-arm-chromebooks to get started.
 
the best supported other arm laptop is the a few years old lenovo c630 (not the chromebook version) and it is still missing some basic functionality here and there (sleep/suspend etc.). another option - the pinebook pro - is in a different performance and quality league (sadly downwards).
 
best wishes - hexdump

Done.
 
Next time @MichaIng (or anyone, really) please 'flag' the post to bring it to (all) moderator attention.  I only happened to notice your request because I was skimming through the All Activity feed like I usually do.

I received at least one PM so far that I did not know the answer to.
 
So, rather than all of us spend a lot of effort duplicating info, I thought maybe good idea to compile these in one place.  Especially as we have an influx of new Board Maintainers at the moment.
 
I also encourage people to stop by IRC and say hello.  I shall also endeavor to copy the most useful bits from IRC into this thread as they come up.  Maybe later can be distilled even further into some docs page or ...?  Anyway...
 
So, first up:
 
Q: How /what checks/tests to run?
 
A: OK, I guess I thought armbian/autotests was more about that (long in development hardware), however looking again now it seems it's actually just a script which can be run on its own, just directly on SBC (even without that test rig).  Amirite?

This is not so much a 'Tutorial' or a 'Review' as it is an overview (and/or starting point for further research) of some things to consider when setting up a file server, some in general and then some more particular to SBC.
 
In the simplest case, you could attach almost any drive to almost any board, by any number of ways, and you have yourself 'a file server.'  However with even a small amount of effort, there are so many better ways to do things nowadays.  We have a lot more interesting hardware choices, advanced filesystems, etc. and so those are mostly what I want to talk about.
 
But first, some context.
 
Dedicated distros vs simple directory sharing
 
Personally I am not a fan of dedicated distros like FreeNAS, OMV, etc. as I consider them to be too 'heavy weight' and single solution specific.  I mean, if you need some/all of those features, or you like them or whatever, then great, use them.
 
However, a 'file server' is one of the simplest use cases of a 'server' and I am sure one which almost everyone buying a SBC will do at some point.  IMO, all one needs to do is simply share some folder(s) via either NFS (if your network is mostly GNU/Linux machines) or Samba/SMB (if your network is mostly Windows machines).  And that's it, you're done!  Simple, lightweight, and using standard protocols (well, a little less 'standard' in case of Windows, but I digress ).
 
You could also add any of the software included in the 'all in one' solutions in first paragraph on a 'piece by piece' basis, if/when you need them.  Personally I am more of a fan of starting small (vanilla Armbian base) and then adding things you need one by one.  But you are of course free to do whatever you want.
 
Setting any of that up, or debating about it, is considered off-topic for this thread, as there are tons of resources already around the Internet about those things.  So I want to focus on other, (IMO) more interesting, aspects.  You are welcome to make your own thread with a different focus, of course.
 
Important note about hardware RAID
 
RAID, in case you were unaware, means "Redundant Array of Independent Disks."
 
For a looooooong time, I (and I think many others with SOHO NAS perspective) thought that 'hardware RAID was the only proper way to do it' but in the course of researching ZFS I eventually became convinced otherwise.  In fact, apparently, historically 'big-iron' filesystems (Solaris, others) were always run with software RAID in the enterprise as there are a lot of advantages to that.
 
Just think about it.  If your hardware RAID card dies, you need to replace it with exactly the same model, before you can even begin to recover your data.  With software RAID, you just re-connect drives and you are back in business (with ZFS, you can even connect them in any random order, amazing!).
 
In particular if you are using ZFS, hardware RAID controllers are not recommended.  I am not sure how much this applies to other similar software RAID systems, but it would stand to reason that it does (IMO).
 
Hardware controllers are also typically very expensive and proprietary.  Where software RAID uses readily available and inexpensive commodity hardware (while actually increasing reliability).  All of which is why I have become such a big fan of it, whether we are talking about ZFS (which I like) or some other software RAID solution you may prefer instead.
 
Now, with that out of the way, onward!
 
Filesystem
 
Assuming you came to similar conclusions as I did in previous section already, this is where our decision making process really begins in earnest IMO.  As the way I see it, choice of file system will dictate topology, which will in turn dictate choice of hardware (which SBC to buy).
 
Of course if you already bought some SBC, you are in a different boat (and working backwards, from my point of view ).  Anyway, you will have to adapt accordingly (and/or buy different hardware).  However, if you are already there, go to 'Historical Overview' section, and maybe you can find some solution there which will work with the hardware you already have.
 
Now, back on track, we are really lucky nowadays, thanks to F/LOSS, to have some industrial grade, software based filesystems available to us mere mortals! 
 
I like ZFS, but certainly, opinions will differ.  Some people like btrfs, in fact I got into a lengthy (but IMO informative) debate with @tkaiser about that.
 
Then there are other distributed things like Ceph (and others) which I will admit to knowing less about.  If you do, kindly add your thoughts to the thread when you have a moment.
 
Point being, hardware setup for someone like me (using ZFS) or even someone using btrfs will be perhaps quite different than someone using something distributed like Ceph.  Just keep that in mind.
 
Historical Overview (SBC Hardware)
 
I want to cover some of things which came before, as I think they are relevant to understanding where we are today.
 
In the beginning, there was darkness.  Wait, let me fast forward a bit. 
 
I will start with the creation of Armbian.  Which happened, in fact, because Igor was trying to set up a file server on a cubietruck.  True story (and like I said, you are not alone, this is a common use-case)!    Anyway, many of us bought (A20 based) cubietruck back then, because they sold a small power adapter board which made this easy and they also had a SATA connector right on the board.  I think they were one of first to do this in fact (I could be wrong).
 
After that, a lot of us used (more powerful Samsung Exynos5 based octo-core) ODROID-XU4, along with a good quality USB to SATA adapter with UASP.  That one in particular was recommended by tkaiser a long time ago, however -- as of time of writing this post -- PINE64 still sell it in their store(!).  And it may be an 'okay' solution if you have some (especially, USB3 capable) board laying around that you just want to use.  Some people are still using this today.  But we have a lot better options now.
 
Then RK3399 came on the scene.  Which was very exciting, because these support not only PCIe, but they are also 64-bit (which is required for ZFS).  Unfortunately, it took literally years for these to become really stable.  Lucky for you, this is all in the past by now.  And so, currently, many people will probably recommend RK3399 as a file (or other) server.
 
There are a lot of other boards out there, which I do not have as much experience with.  But I also try to note only historically significant developments here (at least the way I see them).  If you have any to add, please comment below or contact me somehow (PM or IRC) and I will edit this post and add them.
 
Usage (other than file server)
 
As I already stated, almost any cheap board can be a (minimal) 'file server.'  From that point of view, more powerful boards (like RK3399, or others) are overkill.  However maybe you want better throughput.  Or more disks.  Or, like me, you want to run advanced filesystem like ZFS (also with more disks).
 
Another thing which happens is that, once you handle the simple case of serving files, before you know it you will probably want to start doing more than that.  You may already have some more demanding requirements in mind beforehand.
 
For all these reasons, a slightly more powerful (and more expensive) board may be a better choice, as you will not be limited in the future.  But if you are very sure about your needs and wants, and have perhaps other boards on your network to handle processing intensive tasks, this may not apply to you.  Just something to consider.
 
Hardware Recommendations (RK3399 based)
 
For reasons mentioned at end of 'Historical Overview' section, many of us are fans of RK3399 based devices nowadays.
 
Within this subset, you will get a lot of opinions.    I know because I spent literally years asking people (including developers), while I was waiting for RK3399 to mature.  Some developers think certain vendors make crappy hardware (and maybe they are right).  Or they prefer the boards they know and develop on (naturally, IMO).  Some vendors support the project a lot more than others (PINE64, notably, do not support Armbian at all to my knowledge).  So you will have to do some amount of your own research, and form your own opinion here.
 
I don't want to discount any of the above criteria too much.  However, in the end, at least for me, one criteria bubbled to the top.  And that was direct PCIe (or SATA) support.  Since we are talking about RK3399 here, this means PCIe support.  Which of course is in the SoC, but that is not what I am talking about.  I am talking about putting a standard PCIe physical interface directly on the board.
 
This way, you can buy any standard cheap/dumb PCIe to SATA adapter card.  You can keep spares.  You will be able to obtain them for the foreseeable future.
 
By contrast, you can certainly rig up your own adapters, cables, etc. from GPIO.  But personally, I find that fiddly and it doesn't strike me as the most reliable.  I know some people are doing this just fine though.
 
Another way, is that many vendors sell some sort of HAT, which provides SATA connectivity.  However I find this short-sighted and -- quite frankly -- self-serving.  What if they are out of stock, or stop making them?  You are out of luck.  Or you would need to revert to the above option (rigging up cables and adapters).  It's good for them selling add-on hardware though I guess -- hence my 'self-serving' comment -- but maybe not the best for you and me in terms of keeping our important data available and up and running, on a long term basis.
 
Therefore I say, skip all of that and go with a board that has a standard physical PCIe right on the board.
 
ROCKPro64
 
And AFAIK, there is only one (standalone SBC) RK3399 that meets that description, which is ROCKPro64.  Of course, I am not the first to come to same conclusion, in fact there is a whole thread where myself and some other like-minded folks discuss using ROCKPro64 as NAS.
 
I say 'standalone SBC', because I almost forgot...
 
Helios 64
 
These of course are no longer made, and Kobol, our once partners, have unfortunately closed up shop.  However they still come up for sale on the forums from time to time (usually in Kobol Club but could be anywhere).
 
Here you would be getting a more integrated solution, often including a nice case, for perhaps a bit more money.
 
Some people have had problems with stability though, which I am not sure were ever fully worked out.  Have a look through Kobol club (linked above) and form your own opinion.
 
Hardware Recommendations (not RK3399 based)
 
ODROID HC4
 
ODROID HC4 was also brought up today, when this subject came up in IRC, by @rpardini as that is what he uses.  This is an interesting alternative to the above, except Amlogic (S905X3) based (like a lot of TV boxes).  Which to me means two things:
 
1. It almost certainly requires blobs.
2. It's probably cheaper than RK3399.
 
Well in fairness ROCKPro64 probably requires some blobs, too.  But somehow I get the impression that Amlogic are really obnoxious with their blobs, and I am not a fan of them as a company because of this.  Surely a developer will need to correct me here. 
 
Anyway, I am not sure how it compares in processing power.  I suspect less than RK3399(?).  However for media transcoding, it may actually be better (perhaps hardware decoders(?), speculation on my part).
 
Also for simple 'file server' use-case, in particular with Ceph or something like that, it becomes more interesting IMO.  Again, quoting rpardini from IRC today: "scale out, not up."
 
Future
 
There are newer SoCs, like RK3566 and others.  At this time, they are a lot like RK3399 was early on.  Very exciting, but not able to realize their full potential due to lack of (software/Linux) development.
 
The consensus among developers seems to be that RK3566 development should go faster/easier than RK3399 development, because of all the ground work that was laid in the course of the latter.  Maybe that's true, but we are still talking about some time.  Maybe less years, but still significant time.
 
If/when this changes, I will try and remember to update the post.  Feel free to ping me by posting, I should get notified.
 
Others?
 
Possibly anything in NAS category.  Which I mostly covered already (above, in more detail) but can always change in future.
 
Certainly I forgot (or don't know about) some others.  I have shared what I learned from my research the last several years while looking for solution for myself.  However I do want to make this a more general resource that we can all point to, so please discuss, and I will be happy to edit this post later on and add relevant info.
 
To clarify, I am not talking about 'any SBC which can be made into a file server' which is almost any of them, but rather particular hardware which is interesting for some specific reason(s), especially currently (or perhaps historically, which I would add to that section).
 
Cheers!
 
 

Don't be discouraged if people don't see this right away.  Maybe bump it again later.  Well, here, take my bump. 
 
Those warnings are to scare off the tidal waves of people seeking free support through the back door, not for actual well thought out propositions like you are making here. 
 
Did you try playing with this locally yet?
 
 

Do you have something against regular vanilla Debian?  As a long time Debian user myself, I would feel much more out of my depth on Manjaro, personally.

Nice chart!  So nice, in fact, that I will spare you the rms sermon. 
 

Opened PR for this change: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/3619
 
regards,
Chris

Do you have any hint on what to look at to try to fix that issue ?
I might invest some time on it (and hopefully also get some more knowledge about these things)

It seems to me like outreach efforts over the years (by people like @NicoD, etc.) have been putting us on the map.  I also tried to help get the word out on last release announcement, which ended up being picked up / re-posted more places than ever before (including LWN, Tom's Hardware, r/linux, etc.) which I think probably helped, too.

If the (one) disk is large enough, you could also dual boot.

Don't be discouraged if people don't see this right away.  Maybe bump it again later.  Well, here, take my bump. 
 
Those warnings are to scare off the tidal waves of people seeking free support through the back door, not for actual well thought out propositions like you are making here. 
 
Did you try playing with this locally yet?
 
 

Updating images 20220317 (edge 5.17 and current 5.16).
The operation of the standard procedure for installing the system on eMMC via armbian-config has been verified (i.e. you can install the system on eMMC directly on the Quartz64 itself, no additional adapter is needed to write the eMMC module via USB).
Added support for starting the system from USB media. This greatly simplifies and expands the possibilities of running different systems (for example, during testing). Now you can use not only SD cards, but also any USB media to start (and/or work). For example, I installed and configured the Armbian working system on eMMC (with support for launching from USB) and now I easily launch other Armbian test images from ordinary USB flash drives, which is much easier to handle (no card readers are needed to write SD cards, the cost of USB flash drives is much lower and the choice of which models to use \ buy is much wider).

I recently received a sample of Quartz64. I have added CSC level support for Quartz64a to the ArmbianTV build system, after checking and testing, I plan to send a PR with these changes to the official Armbian build system.
 
The first test images for Quartz64 can be found at the link.

https://disk.yandex.ru/d/xMVoaZXFFcWuog

Hi all,
 
While building a custom image that needs to do some things at the end of the first bootup and reboot, I ran into some issues with armbian-firstrun.service. It currently has Type=simple, which means dependencies will be started when armbian-firstrun is *started*, and there is no clean way to wait until after it has *finished*. Looking to fix this, I noticed some other things that could be improved in this area, such as using systemd's first-boot-complete.target and ConditionFirstBoot to more simply manage first-boot-only services.
 
I'm considering implementing some changes and submitting them in a PR, but before I do that, I'd like to get some feedback on the approach and whether it seems worth investing time into. I considered creating a github issue about this, but given it is sort-of a feature request and the github new issue wizard seems intended to redirect away from github issues, I thought to instead post here. If a github issue seems more appropriate, I'll gladly repost there.
 
In any case, to solve the particular problem I was having (a service that needs to run after the full first boot has completed, including resizing and firstrun script), here's three incremental changes that I would think would make sense (just 1. would be the minimal to solve this problem, 1. + 2. would solve it more generally, and 1. + 2. + .3 would simplify the code a bit maybe).

1. Make armbian-firstrun.service `Type=oneshot`, so you can declare `After=armbian-firstrun.service` and `After=armbian-resize-filesystem.service`. This also means that system boot is delayed until this service is completed, but it does not prevent other boot services to run in parallel, so I would not consider this an issue (if it is, then removing the `Before=getty...` stuff could be considered, which is currently pointless anyway (you will not get a login prompt until armbian-firstrun.service is started, but it will not wait for completion). Note that using `Type=simple` in armbian-firstrun.service originates from https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/ee8d396fa639cd89e08fdd6646c32308f3b25f4f, but there is no rational for this choice.
2. Give armbian-firstrun.service and armbian-resize-filesystem `Wants=first-boot-complete.target` and `Before=first-boot-complete.target` so `first-boot-complete.target` does not fire until `armbian-firstrun` is done, allowing others to just do `After=first-boot-complete.target` without having to explicitly reference specific services.
3. Give armbian-firstrun.service and armbian-resize-filesystem `ConditionFirstBoot=yes` to let systemd ensure they are only called on the first boot. This allows removing the `systemctl disable` calls in these respective scripts as well, but needs the `/etc/machine-id` file to be removed (see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=900366#20), but that's probably a good idea anyway (to be regenerated on first boot, currently all machines using the same image have the same machine id).
 
One thing (feature or seeming problem maybe) with using ConditionFirstBoot as suggested above, is that systemd ensures that if the first boot is interrupted, the first boot services are ran again on the subsequent boots, until they have all ran completely (to ensure they all had a chance to ran). This is implemented by (roughly) running ConditionFirstBoot services only if `/etc/machine-id` does not exist, and only writing it to disk *after* all `first-boot-complete.target` services have completed (also when they failed, I think). This means that if the boot is interrupted before *all* first-boot services are ran, all of them will be ran again on the next boot and needs these services to be ok with being ran twice (this is also currently the case when the boot is interrupted when either or both services are still running, except that if either service completes, then that particular service will not be retried, but others might be). See also https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/machine-id.5.html
 
As a related optimization, if 1. above is applied I think we could also add a `Before=ssh.service` to armbian-firstrun.service and remove the sshd restart from `armbian-firstrun`, so systemd just delays sshd startup until the keys are generated (but only if armbian-firstrun is active, so on subsequent boots sshd is started as normal).
 
Also, regardless of all of the above, I see that the armbian-firstrun deletes the ssh host keys and then forces regenerating them by calling dpkg-reconfigure. However, it would seem safer to me to actually delete the ssh keys at the end of image generation somewhere (maybe in `post_debootstrap_tweaks()`?), to really rule out the possibility of machines all using the same (publicly known) keys from the image file.
 
So, how do these sound?

I needed rpi-clone support for Armbian as well, so I implemented at least basic support at https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone/pull/140

Testing welcome (probably best to just download the script from the pullrequest, since there has not been significant activity in that repo, so I do not expect the PR to be merged anytime soon...)