downloaded Armbian_25.8.1_Orangepi_trixie_current_6.12.41_minimal.img - Cant find the boot drive -

[CNCJIM]

I am downloading  three different builds from 6.12 for orange pi 5.  I have an orange pi 5 pro but since there is not dtb entry in 6.12 for that sbc in the Armbian 25.8.1 6.12.28  dtb file I used  the orange pi 5b.dtb entry which works with the Armbian 25.8.1 6.1.115 images.  

 

The result is that the initramfs cant find a root disk - and when checking for drives in initramfs  - there are none  ls /dev/disks/by-uuid. So the initramfs file isn't running correctly as its not finding drives.    I went back and loaded Armbian_24.8.1_Rock-5c-trixid_current_6.12.42_minimal.image and that boots up to root login.  However if I change the card type to orangepi-5b. I cannot boot - in exactly the same manner - no drives found by initramfs.

 

I have decided to go back to Armbian_25.8.1_Orangepi5-trixie_vendor_6.1.115_xfce_desktop.img  - flash that and change the armbianEnv.txt to use the orangepi-5-pro   setting.  At 6.1.115, the image dtb/rockchip directory still has an entry for the orangepi-5-pro.   - the new one doesn't. 

 

I am curious if I am just out of luck getting updates for orange pi 5 pro? will orange pi 5b be supported in the future?   I have working images for debian 13 - and 6.1.115 versions,  so my orange pi 5 is useable as is.  I bought this sbc as I could get a useable NVME M.2 drive.  I see that all new Orange pi sbc's are using the RK3588 chipset not the RK3588s   variant.   Opinions - there are new Orange Pi 5 variants - Ultra, Max, Plus etc. I dont need tons of HDMI, I want an NVME M.2 slot or two to run the OS on fast drives.  -Or should I abandon Orange Pi and look elsewhere.

 

[SteeMan]

I'll provide some background on what you are experiencing.

6.1 is the vendor kernel.  This is what comes from rockchip and is a hacked together set of code that they release to board builders.  Armbian doesn't have really any interest in maintaining this code base.  6.12 is mainline Linux directly from kernel.org with some additional.patches applied.  It often tales years for the open source community to get new CPU variants incorporated into the mainline kernel code base, as the vendors (rockchip and OrangePi in this case) don't generally contribute.

So 6.12 is actually far behind in feature support for your board.  The edge kernel, 6

16 would be better.  But if you want a feature complete kernel.for your board, the 6.1 vendor kernel is best.  If you want security updates but can deal with lack of some features, then the edge kernel should be your choice (at least until early next year when Armbian current moves to the next Linux LTS release).

 

Also, from the perspective of best boards under Armbian, you probably are better off with Armbian supported boards, not a community supported board which by definition doesn't have anyone maintaining it.

 

Final note, is that Orange Pi as a company does nothing to support the open source community.  I'd say their main goal is to pump out new hardware as fast as possible and not supporting older hardware in any way to force people to spend more money with them. In general support and software is a huge cost and doesn't provide any profit for them, so they choose not to provide it.

[CNCJIM]

Thanks for the background information.  I installed the  orange pi 5  - 6.1.115 release with XFCE desktop. I edited the armbianEnv.txt to set up the pointer to the orange pi pro dtb  entry.  and booted it up just fine.   With this, most things work well,  To run the OS on the nvme M.2 drive,  you cannot boot up from the nvme m.2 drive.  Through some mistake that was made by the designers, you must always boot from an SD card for the initramfs to work enough to find the nvme m.2 drive.          I made a copy - of the SD card to a second SD card on a separate system.  Used this SD card to restart the Orange Pi 5 pro.   Then changed the UUID of the /dev/nvme0n1p1 partition.  (tune2fs -U)  updated the armbianEnv.txt file on the boot SD card  and the nvme0n1p1 drive.   and rebooted -   Now root is mounted to /dev/nvme0n1p1  partition.   I have to leave the SD card in the slot to boot the system. but I am running off the NVME drive - Gen3 x 4 which should run at roughly 800-1000 MB/s  on average according to Tom's hardware.  That is probably 10x most SD cards transfer rate.      Bottom line -  I have a working Orange Pi 5 pro running on an NVMe M.2 drive - with the ability to get 10x throughput  over using an SD card and  up to 8TB of storage .   Now it wasn't simple to actually set it up.  It took some research and a learning curve.   So I am not too happy about the lack of upfront information about getting this to work.  But it is working.    I had tried too build a real time kernel for this system.  I did rebuild a kernel, but when I set the RT config up - I didn't have list of configuration question answers ready - Needed more information.   The general idea was to get a fast multicore system with huge storage capacity and use this to run robotic systems.  I am missing the real time kernel,  I will run some latency tests to check the worst case jitter and look for a config setup.  I see that there is now a Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry P5 real time kernel on a debian 12  release.   I will see if I can get any build information for the real time kernel build.   Thanks for the feedback.    I will start looking for a different sbc model  - among the platinum supported group. 

[CNCJIM]

I was considering  rebuilding the  initrd image for orange pi 5 as I think there was an issue  in what was put on the image file. But now I have an a system settup with 6.1.115 - I should be good.