[HN Gopher] Armbian Updates: OMV support, boot improvents, Rockc...
___________________________________________________________________
Armbian Updates: OMV support, boot improvents, Rockchip
optimizations
Author : transpute
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-05-12 07:51 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.armbian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.armbian.com)
| proxysna wrote:
| Armbian is an exceptional project, even if the support might be
| uneven in some places, being able to roll out the same OS across
| almost every SBC i have is an absolute game changer. If there is
| support, Armbian is worth trying 100% of the time.
|
| Edit: Also if you don't like/want Ubuntu/Debian their build
| documentation is pretty great.
| dima55 wrote:
| Their website doesn't answer the obvious question: what is it,
| and how is it different from vanilla debian? Do you know?
| qwertox wrote:
| Vanilla Debian will not run on your nice and shiny Radxa
| Rocks 5B or Banana Pi whatever.
| dima55 wrote:
| Why not? What's missing?
| qwertox wrote:
| Different boot process, U-Boot needs to be compiled for
| the exact board, drivers for the specialized components
| are needed, DTB (on ARM systems, the kernel doesn't probe
| hardware the same way a PC does) and other reasons.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| _> Different boot process, U-Boot needs to be compiled
| for the exact board_
|
| Why? That sounds dumb. And (assuming you're correct), how
| does Armbian deal with that / get around it?
| ajb wrote:
| It's basically the same in the x86 world : your bios is
| customised to the board
|
| The sad part is that on ARM the kernel is usually _also_
| custom compiled for the board. So what happens is that
| Armbian ship a different image for each board.
|
| If you go and look in
| https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm
| you see a zillion "mach-xxx" directories for different
| SoC architectures, even if they all use Arm.
|
| Device-tree is a partial solution, but no-one seems to
| have an incentive to finish the job and let a single
| image run on any (sufficiently recent) arm board. It's
| difficult for the community to fix because most people
| have only their own board. Someone would need to pay for
| a CI rig with every board, and some kernel devs to do the
| work of building a single kernel to run across
| everything. (I think that's originally what Linaro was
| for - not sure why they didn't finish the job)
| qwertox wrote:
| Right, the x86 BIOS/UEFI is baked into the motherboard
| firmware and handles early hardware init in a mostly
| standardized way. But with ARM boards, there's no
| universal firmware, it usually needs to be part of the
| image you download for that specific board.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Why? That sounds dumb.
|
| Good, you understand the situation perfectly.
|
| > And (assuming you're correct), how does Armbian deal
| with that / get around it?
|
| You'll notice that if you try to download it from
| https://www.armbian.com/download/ , nearly every board
| has a different download image; this is because every one
| of those images embeds its own boot chain. There _are_
| efforts (in some projects, I 'm not aware of armbian
| doing this) to build some amount of early bootloader per-
| board (often uboot), and just make the install steps
| something like "install this per-board thing, _then_
| install the real OS using a standard image " but that's
| less common and doesn't work super well when that initial
| bootloader has to go on the same storage device as the
| main OS.
| dima55 wrote:
| I believe that's common on ARM devices. But "vanilla
| debian" generally refers to userspace, and that should
| just work. Is this "armbian" thing quite literally
| "kernel + bootloader + vanilla debian"? The website
| doesn't say that in any obvious place
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| Pretty much, plus their little configuration utility for
| loading dtb overlays among other things.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| How does Armbian compare to DietPi?
|
| FWIW: I'm running dietPi on my OG Pi Zero W and it doesn't even
| hit 30% resource usage.
| chris37879 wrote:
| I just stumbled across armbian recently and I must say I really
| like it.
|
| I wanted to use UEFI, but my orangepi cm5 modules don't seem to
| have the SPI chip needed to store the UEFI there, so I'd have to
| load it on a partition and lose out on some features like
| persisting variables across boot.
|
| The arm ecosystem really needs to settle on some sort of
| universal boot loader / firmware layer and stop just hacking up
| the linux kernel and not contributing back to it.
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| I'm not an Arm dev and am just a consumer so I may be
| misunderstanding, but isn't Arm SystemReady pretty much the
| thing that's intended to solve the problem you're talking about
| (among others)?
|
| https://developer.arm.com/documentation/107981/0302/SystemRe...
| robotnikman wrote:
| It is, but it seems like only servers are adopting it at the
| moment. Or high end ARM workstations. I can't think of any
| consumer devices or SBC's off the top of my head that support
| it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-12 23:01 UTC)