update to edge kernel rolling release 6.16.x

[Dantes]

My setup is still running, yay! I even updated to Trixie and all worked out fine.

 

But I'm stuck on edge kernel 6.12.x, I saw that rolling had 6.16.x. So how do I install/convert to the rolling 6.16.x edge kernel ?

[SteeMan]

First off, why do you want to?  As the name 'edge' should imply, edge kernels are development kernels that are for testing purposes and may or may not work, and may break at any time.  'current' 6.12 in your case are LTS kernels that should be stable and more suited for non-development/testing use cases.

 

If you do want edge kernels then you can use armbian-config to switch. 

[Dantes]

HDMI audio support was introduced in kernel version 6.15-rc1, but has yet to be backported to the Long-Term Support version. The absent audio functionality is currently the only notable issue affecting the overall user desktop experience.

 

 

Edited September 29 by Dantes

[The Tall Man]

You can switch to an edge kernel using armbian-config.

 

You can install the stable edge or switch to the rolling releases and install the rolling edge. Stable edge is at 6.16.4 and should work just fine.

[Werner]

5 hours ago, Dantes said:

but has yet to be backported to the Long-Term Support version

Probably never will until roll-over to next LTS version. We don't have people to maintain this.

[Dantes]

13 hours ago, The Tall Man said:

armbian-config

 

Hmm... i dont think thats in there anymore due to some spring cleaning, all i have is:

• armbian-add-overlay
• armbian-install
• armbian-upgrade

So I navigated to : 

https://github.com/armbian/configng/blob/main/tools/repository/armbian-config.sources

Where I found:

https://github.armbian.com/configng/

So I did:

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/armbian.gpg] https://github.armbian.com/configng stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian-development.list > /dev/null
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install armbian-config

 

Lets hope it works out 

 

12 hours ago, Werner said:

We don't have people to maintain this.

 

I totally understand, this problem will solve itself in what looks to be Linux 6.18 coming December.

[Dantes]

And it did not work out, no sound in the edge 6.16 kernel.

 

I did find : https://lkml.org/lkml/diff/2025/8/7/872/1 to enable HDMI-audio, which is most likely the reason. However the edge also has some graphics distortion (orange glow), so I'm not gaining a lot by applying that patch.

 

Ill let everyone know 

 

 

Edited September 30 by Dantes

[The Tall Man]

1 hour ago, Dantes said:

the edge also has some graphics distortion (orange glow)

 

I have a different board (Orange PI 5 Plus). My experience with the edge is that it works great in Wayland and terribly in X. Also KDE Plasma Wayland is different than Gnome Wayland (and Plasma is buggy in Trixie). So you could try all three combinations and see if one works better than the others.

 

1 hour ago, Dantes said:

in the edge 6.16 kernel.

 

You tried both the stable edge and the rolling edge ...with the same results?

Edited September 30 by The Tall Man

[The Tall Man]

Btw, about things turning orange... I had that experience some time ago before I got into Armbian. I did a clean install of Debian Bookworm. Then I tried installing the vendor GPU drivers and packages from the Orange PI company. Their drivers and packages were so horribly hacked / designed that various programs that needed certain SoC features needed to be custom modified to work with those specific vendor drivers. So all versions of those programs needed be held and were non-upgradable if I wanted continued GPU and video acceleration support. Anyway the main GPU driver package, when I installed it myself (instead of whatever secret sorcery their installation did), it turned things orange.

 

Fortunately now, pure Trixie works out of the box on my board (from the Debian installer .iso), except that the kernel needs to be upgraded from their 6.12 to 6.16.3 from trixie-backports. Armbian's edge kernel on an otherwise pure Trixie is even better than Debian's, because it's customized for Rockchip.

 

If you've been doing things like I was trying to before, things have much improved and now simple is better and it works. Also things tend to get really mangled up when upgrading over time - especially major LTS upgrades. Why not try a fresh install of a 25.8.1 Armbian image? 

[Dantes]

THIS IS NOT RECOMMENDED

 

Bbut since I'm on edge anyway:

 

I could not apply the patch as I did not have .dtsi file anywhere in /boot/dts/rockchip. So I tried to enable it manually by dts/dtb conversion, but that just did not work. So there is more to it than the patch alone.

 

So I tried a different hackier route: I replaced the dtb with one from LibreElec, just to see if it would work, and it does:
 

cd /tmp
wget https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreELEC-RK3588.aarch64-12.90.1-nanopi-r6c.img.gz
zcat LibreELEC-RK3588.aarch64-12.90.1-nanopi-r6c.img.gz > LibreELEC-RK3588.aarch64-12.90.1-nanopi-r6c.img
sudo fdisk -l /tmp/LibreELEC-RK3588.aarch64-12.90.1-nanopi-r6c.img  | grep img1
## /tmp/LibreELEC-RK3588.aarch64-12.90.1-nanopi-r6c.img1 *      32768 1081343 1048576  512M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((512*32768)) LibreELEC-RK3588.aarch64-12.90.1-nanopi-r6c.img /mnt
sudo cp -p /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3588s-nanopi-r6c.dtb /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3588s-nanopi-r6c.dtb.orig
sudo cp -p /mnt/rockchip/rk3588s-nanopi-r6c.dtb /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3588s-nanopi-r6c.dtb
sudo umount /mnt
## reboot the machine

 

Hey, I got sound, yay! 

 

@The Tall Man

Will this work on other boards ? Idk ymmv.

But it has dtb's for orangepi-5/b/max/plus/ultra

 

In short: the kernel has sound implemented since 6.15rc1, so its just the Device Tree that needs to be updated. Otherwise this would not have worked.

 

Edited October 1 by Dantes

[Werner]

9 hours ago, Dantes said:

, so its just the Device Tree that needs to be updated.

Yes, this is quite common that feature xy has been implemented but the device trees don't get necessary updates. Often this is fixed by inheritance but sometimes adjustments on board level are necessary.

Feel free to compare and send a PR to fix this until edge is bumped to 6.17 or even 6.18-rc1

[The Tall Man]

7 hours ago, Werner said:

Feel free to compare and send a PR to fix this until edge is bumped to 6.17 or even 6.18-rc1

There was a devicetree related pull request sent for the audio issue on another board a month ago. It hasn't gotten any action since it was made. There apparently haven't been any devicetree-related patches in the entire Armbian build system - at least for this other board (Orange PI 5 Plus). So this would be the first.

https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/8568

 

Edited October 1 by The Tall Man

[Werner]

9 hours ago, The Tall Man said:

https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/8568

Sent a nudge.

[laibsch]

10 hours ago, Werner said:

Sent a nudge.

 

Thank you for the nudge.  But who are you nudging?

 

It isn't up to the PR author (me) to get this accepted.  It's been rotting away since nobody actually tested it.  And that could only be done by people who have the device, including @The Tall Man, I believe or others.  I do not have access to the device(s) in question.  And then one of the other devs needs to accept it. 

 

I'm happy to rebase or respond to reviews, but that hadn't happened, so we are now going in circles.  So, the question is really who you are nudging.

[The Tall Man]

11 hours ago, Werner said:

Sent a nudge

 

Thanks for giving it a nudge. Looks like some activity's brewing on it now.

 

@laibsch, As I said before, I don't have an account with github. But I had looked at your Commit, and it looked to me like you copied the existing edge kernel's .dts, but with the needed modification. From my looking at it, I think it would work. Although if I were doing it, I would do it in 2 commits:

1. An initial commit that's just a copy of the present devicetree to bring it into the patch system, since it's apparently never been part of the patch system.

2. The change to address the specific issue.

 

To address what paolosabatino's, comment on github said... The current kernel and edge kernel have two different devicetrees. The one this is about is the edge kernel's devicetree.

 

[Werner]

13 hours ago, laibsch said:

But who are you nudging?

Basically you as heads-up for upcoming kernel bump in this branch and everyone else for attention getting this merged (or not)