State of support for Raspberry Pi 5

[Ghoelian]

I recently got a Raspberry Pi 5 and installed Armbian on it. Most things work fine, aside for some weird output issues in htop and nano.

 

I noticed, when I go to the Raspberry Pi page on Armbian, the url refers to the Pi 4b, not the 5. I also found some articles online linking to a specific Pi 5b page (which I thought was weird since that model doesn't exist), but it just redirects to the 4b page.

Then, I went searching in the archive and found that, at some point, there were specific 5b images available (https://armbian.hosthatch.com/archive/rpi5b/archive).

 

Which of these should I use? Is the 4b image okay to use on a Pi 5? Or do you not support the Pi 5 at all?

 

Sorry if this has been answered before, it is kind of impossible to search this forum for similar questions with the super aggressive rate limiting.

[Werner]

When support for Raspberry Pis has been added there was no model 5 yet. With the intention to only support the flagship the board configuration was added as rpi4b.conf. Since then support was extended across all models from 3 and up. However renaming a board config file is an issue. I already had the idea to address that but gave up on it: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/7881

 

tl;dr: rpi4b image will work on all models from 3 to 5. https://www.armbian.com/rpi4b/

[geoW]

Thank you Werner, I propose to put this statement red boxed on top of this rpi landing page. Too many rpi5 help seekers get puzzled, they should be informed, to find more stuff in forum discussions.

Greetings

[Werner]

Agree. @Igor

[Igor]

I guess this should do:

[MMGen]

@Werner, @Igor: Is the Raspberry Pi 500 supported by Armbian? It’s the successor to the RPi 400, for which support is mentioned. Internally, it looks similar to the RPi 5, except that it seems to lack wifi.

Edited January 30 by MMGen

[Werner]

no clue. needs testing. perhaps it just works. kernel sources are the same as rpi os.

[eselarm]

2 hours ago, MMGen said:

Is the Raspberry Pi 500 supported by Armbian?

You can check the .DTB files on the bootfs (FAT32) 1st partition. AFAIK the Pi500 uses a D0 variant of the SoC and that needs a separate/dedicated .dts (when downstream kernel what Armbian also uses). 

When upstream kernel, make sure you have the very latest, as even in 6.18.0-rc? (or 6.19.0-rc? dont remember) I saw some fix w.r.t. naming w.r.t. that D0 variant. And also should pair with proper and/or new enough bootloader (the code in EEPROM). Still upstream kernel might lack a lot of functionality, but at least RP1 should work so RJ45 should work.

[Igor]

Rpi support for whatever of their devices is mainly on the level of RaspberryPi OS. We use their kernels sources as base, add some additional things and release timing is different - not much difference. If they added new device, it should just work. 

 

If anyone wants to improve support or fix WiFi -> https://github.com/armbian/build/pulls

[denbro]

Hello! I have a follow-up question about installing Armbian on a Raspberry Pi 5, and hopefully this is a good place for it. Perhaps this belongs here instead: 

 

 

I just installed the Armbian/Gnome version for Raspberry Pi "4b", as mentioned above, for my Raspberry Pi 5. The OS booted fine and is running. However, I'm trying to install some additional software (specifically this: https://github.com/sunfounder/pipower5/tree/main) and I'm getting errors related to installing the right version of `linux-headers`, the output of `uname`, and possibly the `bcm2711` vs. `bcm2712` CPU.

 

The original error was:

```

Error: E: Unable to locate package linux-headers-6.18.9-current-bcm2711
E: Couldn't find any package by glob 'linux-headers-6.18.9-current-bcm2711'
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'linux-headers-6.18.9-current-bcm2711'

```

When I searched for the available packages, I found the following "closest" options:
 

```

linux-headers-current-bcm2711/noble 26.2.1 arm64 [upgradable from: 26.2.1]
  Armbian Linux current headers 6.18.10-current-bcm2711

linux-headers-current-bcm2712/noble 24.11.1 arm64
  Armbian Linux current headers 6.6.63-current-bcm2712

```

 

At this point, I realized that the installation scripts were pulling the kernel version from the output of `uname`:

 

```

denbro@rpi5b:~$ uname -r

6.18.9-current-bcm2711

denbro@rpi5b:~$ uname -a

Linux rpi5b 6.18.9-current-bcm2711 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Feb  9 10:54:02 UTC 2026 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

```

 

My two main questions are:

 1. Why is the proper linux header not available? My understanding is that, in principle, `linux-headers-$(uname -r)` should always be available.

2. Should I be concerned that my linux kernel thinks it is using the bcm2711 CPU? That's the Pi 4 CPU, but my raspberry pi 5 has a bcm2712. Should I install the version of armbian for the Pi 500?

 

Two additional notes - 1. The Sunfounder software I mentioned above installed without issue on the same device running Raspberry Pi OS Trixie. 2. I originally tried to flash an SD card with Armbian using Raspberry Pi Imager, and it wouldn't boot; the device turned on, and printed a bunch of startup output, and then shut off. After confirming that the SD card worked, I switched to using Armbian Imager to flash the SD card and that led to my current state.

```

denbro@rpi5b:~$ neofetch

        #####           denbro@rpi5b 

       #######          ------------ 

       ##O#O##          OS: Armbian 26.2.1 noble aarch64 

       #######          Host: Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.1 

     ###########        Kernel: 6.18.9-current-bcm2711 

    #############       Uptime: 1 hour, 25 mins 

   ###############      Packages: 1200 (dpkg) 

   ################     Shell: bash 5.2.21 

  #################     Resolution: 1280x800 

#####################   Terminal: /dev/pts/1 

#####################   CPU: (4) @ 2.400GHz 

  #################     Memory: 691MiB / 3983MiB 

```

Let me know if there's any other information I can provide, and thanks in advance for any guidance!