Github Highlights

Key points

Armbian's latest GitHub roundup covers new board support across several SoC families, a move of many Rockchip and Allwinner boards to U-Boot v2026.10, and kernel work on Rockchip, Amlogic and Sophgo hardware. It also lists changes to the build framework, the Imager tool, the configuration utility and the documentation.

New and returning boards

• New Rockchip boards: EasePi R1 and Pine64 Quartz64 Zero (RK3568), ArmSoM CM7s IO board and Boardcon EM3588 (RK3588), Forlinx OK3572-C, and the Skysi X5 laptop.
• The DshanPi R1 and R1+ device trees were reworked, and a DshanPi A1 CM5 image for the Waveshare CM5-to-Pi5 adapter was added.
• Banana Pi BPI-M4 (RTD1395) and Cubieboard 4 are back. Cubieboard 4 gains A80 cpufreq, thermal, HDMI and audio support.
• Lenovo Legion Y700 Gen 4 has initial support on the SM8750 edge kernel, now 7.2.11, with firmware taken from ZUXOS 1.5.10.259.
• NVIDIA Jetson Nano is a new release target on uefi-arm64-dt, which also gains a current branch and edge 7.3.
• Kickpi K2B v2 gets a Seekwave SWT6621S SDIO Wi-Fi/Bluetooth driver.

Bootloader refresh

• These boards move to U-Boot v2026.10, in most cases with TF-A lts-v2.14.11 and newer DDR blobs:
• Radxa RK3399 (DDR blob v1.30 TPL), RockPro64, Rock Pi 4C (with an SPI NOR cap) and NanoPi M4/M4v2
• Orange Pi 4 and 4 LTS, Tinker Board 2, Rock 2A/2F
• Mixtile Blade3 (USB-PD powering) and Mixtile Edge2 (environment in eMMC boot0/1)
• the Recomputer RK3588 devkit (from v2026.07)
• Allwinner: sunxi64 boards get U-Boot v2026.10, TF-A lts-v2.14.11 and Crust v0.6+, with fixes for the Banana Pi M64.
• ZeroPi, Orange Pi PC Plus and Orange Pi Plus 2E get v2026.10 with Crust and a fix for an ARM DMA oops. MangoPi MQ builds v2026.10 with board patches.
• The build framework now fetches U-Boot from the new upstream host git.u-boot-project.org.
• On the LCKFB TaishanPi, U-Boot now sets vdd_npu to 900 mV.

Rockchip kernel and drivers

• RK3588: SoC SATA fixes in kernel and U-Boot for working 6 Gbps links, and CAN nodes for kernel 7.3 and U-Boot v2026.04.
• Mixtile Blade3: boot from SATA and eMMC fixed, fan curve and tach pull-up restored, and RTL8125 PCIe and ethernet0/1 aliases recovered.
• HDMI:
• RK356x gains a 31.5 MHz clock.
• RK3576 audio with 16-bit samples is fixed.
• Two crash guards were added: one for the optional CEC adapter, one for PHY debugfs when no PHY is present.
• Mecotronic R58-HD gets more HDMI/DP outputs.
• RK3399 thermal trips now stay below the hardware shutdown point and gain a throttle floor. RK3328 has an armclk parent/mux mismatch fix.
• Wireless:
• bcmdhd now handles WPA3/SAE with wpa_supplicant 2.11.
• rtw88 support for rtl8723bs is backported, with the matching firmware file added.
• The AIC8800 SDIO driver on NanoPi R28S is now built as DKMS.
• Other fixes:
• RK809/RK817 now write DEV_OFF on poweroff.
• The USB2 PHY respects a fixed peripheral role.
• The hdmirx 5V detect IRQ stays off during suspend.
• A KVM PMU register is no longer overwritten.

Other platforms

• Amlogic meson64 video decoder: fixes for H.264 luma in the first GOP, for MPEG-1/2 decoding, and for start failures with GStreamer and FFmpeg.
• Sophgo SG2000: H.264 encoder and JPEG unit added to coda, plus CODA980 firmware.
• Allwinner D1 builds mainline v7.3 with HDMI. A523/T527 patches (Avaota-A1, Cubie-A5E, OrangePi-4A) are ported to sunxi 6.18 and 7.3.
• The mainline branch moves to the unreleased 7.4-rc1, leaving room for 7.3-stable.

Build framework and packages

• GRUB images can use a separate ext2/ext4 /boot and honour UEFISIZE, sizing the EFI partition when it also serves as /boot.
• New linux-source-package extension.
• Firmware now comes from the newest linux-firmware tag, with a mirror fallback.
• The rootfs cache was invalidated to force a rebuild.
• BSP changes:
• Hardware groups are created and new users are added to them.
• armbian-ssh-title.sh is removed.
• armbian-audio-config returns instead of exiting when sourced.
• aic8800 Bluetooth attach is skipped when the wireless module is absent.
• Missing board pinouts, schematics and instructions are now reported without blocking the build.

Software and tools

• Gaming: new native Steam client module and the Heroic launcher, plus a fix for the Steam install script.
• obs-studio-rockchip is added for trixie and resolute.
• The Bianbu desktop riscv64 rootfs build is fixed.
• Armbian Imager:
• Images that are empty are refused before they can erase a device.
• Updates can be downloaded in the background from Settings.
• Selection panels that fail to load now show an error.
• Board photos are no longer clipped.
• rustls and tokio were bumped to clear cargo audit.

Documentation

• New pages cover the firmware source and branch switches, GITHUB_TOKEN, and the separate /boot on GRUB images.
• The UBOOT_MIRROR default is fixed and denx is added.
• Orange Pi 4 instructions are added.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.