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 2 hours ago [-]
Their website doesn't answer the obvious question: what is it, and how is it different from vanilla debian? Do you know?
qwertox 2 hours ago [-]
Vanilla Debian will not run on your nice and shiny Radxa Rocks 5B or Banana Pi whatever.
dima55 2 hours ago [-]
Why not? What's missing?
qwertox 1 hours ago [-]
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.
dima55 56 minutes ago [-]
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 39 minutes ago [-]
Pretty much, plus their little configuration utility for loading dtb overlays among other things.
RetroTechie 1 hours ago [-]
> 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 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
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)
Edit: Also if you don't like/want Ubuntu/Debian their build documentation is pretty great.
Why? That sounds dumb. And (assuming you're correct), how does Armbian deal with that / get around it?
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)