Armbian and UEFI boot on Rock 5 ITX

[ypopovych]

Hello.

 

I want to try UEFI boot on this board. And I have one question. Can I use Rockchip vendor kernel with Armbian UEFI?

[royk]

Yes, when you out it in device tree mode: https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588?tab=readme-ov-file

[Jurgen.Schober]

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.

[Jurgen.Schober]

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.

Edited Monday at 06:28 PM by Jurgen.Schober

[eselarm]

19 hours ago, Jurgen.Schober said:

UEFI doesn't seem to boot from SD if you don't modify the HW

Maybe not for the ROCK 5 ITX, but for my ROCK 5 B (no eMMC) I can get EDK2-UEFI (v1.1) loaded from SPI or SD. The problem is with all those many Rockchips boards is that they have varying or unknown strategy or setting what the priority of boot devices is. AFAIK seen in some schematics, SARADC and some resistor tree is used. Then it also depends if the U-Boot or EDK2-UEFI or else is hopping to other (MaskROM) readable device or not. I saw it all can be configured in U-Boot (seen on denx.de) but it seems to me that it is almost impossible to make a generic solution. The various wikis seem to describe what is needed to get things working, but my v1.46 ROCK 5 B does not have a header/jumper where I can disable SPI. I see that on Radxa wiki, but older board version I guess. My ROCK 3 A has that header/jumper, so that I used to force only SD-card. For my ROCK 5 B zeroing or erasing SPI is the solution. If I keep Armbian U-Boot edge in SPI, the UEFI on SD-card is ignored.

 

Another thing I also might have had earlier is that the secondary/backup GPT at the and of the device could have still be there, so that is or can be a conflicting situation, for a bootloader, I don't know what is checked in U-Boot etc for example. But if no plans with rest of SD-card I mostly do the use 'sudo blkdiscard' then on the whole SD-card, so all wiped and trimmed.

Edited Tuesday at 08:52 AM by eselarm

[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.