Rock5B+ 25.5 image is broken

[armbuilder]

FYI latest image for rock 5B+ in downloads section is broken (Armbian_25.5.1_Rock-5b-plus_noble_vendor_6.1.115_gnome_desktop)

 

Wont boot at all, previous 25.2.2 images works fine. 

[Werner]

39 minutes ago, armbuilder said:

Wont boot at all

https://debug.armbian.de

[Igor]

Yeah, it was reported at GH too:
https://github.com/armbian/build/issues/8227

Probably related:
https://github.com/armbian/build/issues/8269

No solution yet.

[armbuilder]

Are platinum supported boards not tested on actual hardware before posting images? 

 

FYI we are on of radxas big partners that paid for the platinum membership so there is better support for this board, not sure if all the USB/wifi related driver issues were fixed?

[Igor]

1 hour ago, armbuilder said:

Are platinum supported boards not tested on actual hardware before posting images? 

 

Yes, that is the main idea, but sometimes things slipped trough. Images were tested (we aim to have two people on one platinum target to be able to provide better service, but perfection is still not possible), but here we ran into weird problem that CI compilation silently broke on u-boot recompilation, while local build works. We have a problem with build framework / compiler internals, unrelated to this specific hardware and problem only manifest on some u-boot variants. Right now, I don't have a clear picture, but we are working on it. This was introduced while moving framework to Noble, which is mandatory for some targets and there are some Python libraries troubles ... which are sometimes used for u-boot / ATF compile. Its a mess.

 

1 hour ago, armbuilder said:

not sure if all the USB/wifi related driver issues were fixed?

Software maintenance within such extreme complexity is job that is never done. Generally speaking.

[meco]

2 hours ago, armbuilder said:

not sure if all the USB/wifi related driver issues were fixed

5B+ on vendor (6.1.115) has all I/O related stuff fixed (since 6.1.84) as far as my testing (the one reported in the https://www.armbian.com/rock-5b-plus/ description).

Looking into the broken gnome image though and will update here!

[meco]

@Igor Just tried with the latest image on https://dl.armbian.com/rock-5b-plus/Noble_vendor_gnome. This 100% works as I had tested, so either @armbuilder has a broken flash storage or had an error while writing to the storage medium. Gnome Desktop is working too

 

[meco]

So I was able to reproduce the issue when trying to boot via NVMe after using armbian-config to switch from emmc. Using rkdeveloptool to flash the SPI with https://dl.radxa.com/rock5/sw/images/loader/rock-5b+/release/rock-5b+-spi-image-8ea7ee4-20240730.img (short guide in the spoiler)

Spoiler

rkdeveloptool cs 9
rkdeveloptool ef
rkdeveloptool wl 0 rock-5b+-spi-image-8ea7ee4-20240730.img
rkdeveloptool rd

I was able to boot into the NVMe. Looking into fixing the broken SPI installation