Github Highlights

Key points

Armbian's weekly development roundup covers new board support, the move of mainline edge kernels to 7.3-rc7, build and CI changes, and a large batch of Armbian Imager work.

New boards and firmware

• Boardcon SBC3568 (RK3568) was added, followed by a configuration update and a fix for the Goodix touchscreen X-axis orientation.
• ELTAY RM66 (RK3566) arrives as community support, with vendor HDMI restored and a power-domain workaround in the vendor kernel.
• Anbernic RG Rotate (Unisoc T618 / UMS512) was added together with the new sprd-ums512 family.
• NanoPi M6 V2 was added as an image and virtual board.
• NanoPi R6S, R6C, M6/M6V2 and NanoPC T6/T6-LTS now share one image with shared aliases. The friendlyelec-rk3588 download page is hidden but its aliases remain, and these boards are blacklisted from all CI targets.
• Board image entries were added for Firefly AI Box K3, Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro (xiaomi-piano) and JetHome JetHub D3 (j310).
• New firmware: RTL8723D Bluetooth, WCN7860 Bluetooth and Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro (SM8750).

Kernels

• Mainline is at 7.3-rc7 for rockchip64, meson64 and uefi targets.
• SpacemiT K1 edge moved from 7.2.y to 7.3.y. On current, CONFIG_BPF_JIT_ALWAYS_ON=y was removed, and the Bianbu desktop target is disabled.
• An RK3568 PCIe Root Port reset loop is fixed on rockchip64 7.3.
• An initial rk35xx-vendor-next branch based on 6.12-rkr1 consolidates the Rockchip vendor families.
• Linux 7.2 is enabled for GL-MT2500 (filogic).
• CONFIG_DMABUF_DEBUG is disabled globally, REALTEK_PHY is built in on rockchip64 current/edge, and debug tier 1 now detects hard lockups.
• The vendor kernel gains RS485 support in the 8250 serial driver (RTS and GPIO DE control), NULL vqmmc handling in the MMC core, and no longer panics on a power-domain handshake timeout when always_on is set.
• bcmdhd-dkms builds on Linux 7.3, handles WPA3/SAE with wpa_supplicant 2.11, and is released as 101.10.591.52.27-10.

Board-specific fixes

• Orange Pi 5: GbE is aliased as ethernet0 for a stable NIC name, and sd-uhs-sdr104 is dropped for SD card reliability (vendor and mainline).
• Orange Pi CM5 gets boot fixes. Orange Pi 3B uses one U-Boot image for NVMe and SATA and has its overlay prefix fixed.
• NanoPi R3S-LTS and R76S: ports are named wan/lan and LEDs blink on traffic.
• Helios64: auto power-on is armed in U-Boot, with corrected GPIO numbers and a configurable setting, plus an opt-in CPU stability overlay on 7.3.
• Helios4 gets a stable MAC address from the SPI NOR unique ID.
• meson64: meson64-reboot uses gpiod on current and edge, and the SD power-off DT patch is dropped.
• MangoPi MQ: Boot0/TOC1 is replaced by SPL/FIT, and OpenSBI is updated to v1.9.
• Recore: the A5/A6 GPU clock is set, the board throttles instead of powering off at 90 C, and pstore is kept.
• Anbernic RG Vita Pro prefers the built-in codec over HDMI for audio.
• On Luckfox Lyra Ultra, the user button boots into Loader mode.
• KickPi K2B v2 gets a fail-soft prebuilt FFmpeg v4l2-request install for cedrus hardware decode.

Build and CI

• ccache is now a swappable extension, and the documentation notes that USE_CCACHE no longer has any effect.
• Mainline kernel sources can be fetched from a GitHub mirror (MAINLINE_MIRROR=github is documented). The build falls back to other kernel remotes when one does not answer, and the runner git proxy has a longer timeout.
• arm64 image jobs overflow to X64 runners above ARM64 capacity, and the image build timeout is raised to 60 minutes.
• The deprecated apa extension is dropped, fixing a K3 rootfs cache miss, and a sysctl defaults file collision in the bsp is avoided.
• armbian-add-overlay accepts .dtso files.
• PR authors are pinged about unresolved review conversations after 48 hours, and virtual boards inherit the maintainers of their base board.

Armbian Imager

• Settings is now a full page with board-scoped first-boot profiles.
• A fix described as critical stops the ext4 writer from corrupting the rootfs during autoconfig.
• The target disk is checked in the backend before writing.
• Cache file names stay inside their folder on Windows, decompressed custom image deletes are confined to their folder, and UFS images cached before the #196 fix are dropped.
• Every preset declines the first-login wireless prompt, and the profile step is faster and honours an early cancel.
• Data views no longer hang on skeletons or hide load errors. Checksum, verify and decompress errors and the rolling release labels are translated.
• RustSec advisories are cleared and cargo audit is now blocking. CI lints Rust on Windows and gives fork PRs working test build links.

configng and documentation

• configng adds a SolidPing uptime monitoring module.
• The haos module accepts ARCH=arm for 32-bit ARM and lets NetworkManager manage netplan interfaces.
• ARCH is now set on hosts without /etc/armbian-release.
• The datacenter documentation gains an architecture picture.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.