Armbian 26.2.1 can't boot from MTD on OrangePi5

[zjd]

I updated to Armbian 26.2.1 on OPi5, and it can't boot from MTD (rootfs at NVMe), and I have to use SD card to boot to NVMe as workaround.

 

After looking into this issue, I found rkspi_loader.img is no longer available for current (6.18.8 kernel) u-boot pkg and armbian-config flashes u-boot-rockchip-spi.bin ( or similar sata version) to /dev/mtdblock0 and I think this is wrong image for MTD bootloader. If I use older vendor image, which u-boot pkg has rkspi_loader.img, system can boot to NVMe rootfs and I notice that /dev/mtdblock0 has several gpt partitions including u-boot one, and flashing u-boot-rockchip-spi.bin erases partitions in SPI flash.

 

I noticed that several related changes were introduced since 25.11, such as https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/e5b845f9432abb0408287599bba5889a86e6d068 , but I couldn't do quick fix to bring back working rkspi_loader.img because I am not familiar with whole armbian build.

 

One thing to note that if board was flashed with old rkspi_loader.img and not updated with 26.2 MTD image, it still boots to NVMe  rootfs, but I have other issues such as video playback not working with 6.18 kernel likely due to mismatch u-boot and kernel version leading to wrong HW initialization.

 

BTW, I checked 26.2 u-boot pkg for Rock 5B (similar rk3588 board), and rkspi_loader.img is still included.

Edited Sunday at 07:17 PM by zjd

[zjd]

After digging into more details, I think Armbian has moved to use new U-Boot generated FIT image u-boot-rockchip-spi.bin for SPI boot, however, it doesn't work to boot NVMe rootfs and sometimes breaks the board and I have to erase SPI to get SD card booting. Couldn't find more information how Armbian does MTD boot now.

 

Note that older vendor SPI bootloader can boot kernel 6.18.8 but I ran into other issue like freezing system for a couple of minutes so that I'd say to avoid use old MTD image with 26.2 6.18 kernel.

[zjd]

I connected UART today and did some debugging, and it looks like that this u-boot 2025.10 for Armbian 26.02 doesn't see NVMe drive, i.e. 'nvme scan' returns nothing.

 

Is OPi5 NVMe support included in upstream mainline u-boot?

[Werner]

The related PR states this was tested. @Efe Çetin can you confirm this still works as expected?