Github Highlights

Key points

Armbian's weekly roundup of merged work covers three areas: new board and SoC support, a reworked build and package repository infrastructure, and fixes to the tools users touch on a running system. The post lists every merged change with its pull request.

New and improved hardware

• Mainline support for the Radxa Rock 2A/2F and the Toradex Verdin iMX8M Mini.
• KickPi K2B V2.2 DDR3 gets a full board definition, including a new Maxio MAE0621 PHY driver that fixes Ethernet.
• Orange Pi 4 Pro (Allwinner sun60iw2): GPU, desktop and hardware video decode enabled; the kernel config also adds WireGuard and keeps the Dirty Frag mitigation.
• Amlogic C400-plus: repacked U-Boot, Mali-T820 stabilised, front panel display enabled.
• Smaller fixes for the BPI-M4-Zero, Allwinner D1 (RISC-V, including RTL8723DS Wi-Fi), MangoPi MQ and Anbernic handhelds.
• Device trees for Recore A5-A8, and VP9 decoding on the Rockchip VDPU381 in the 7.2 kernel.
• Orange Pi CM5 gets a USB3 enhancement with an experimental mode; a Seeed Studio reComputer RK3576 devkit device tree was added.
• Banana Pi CM4 IO blacklists the out-of-tree 88x2cs Wi-Fi driver; Mixtile Blade 3 uses its own device tree on the vendor branch.

Kernels

• Rockchip armhf edge kernel bumped to 7.3; mainline moves to 7.3-rc6.
• AYN Odin 3 migrates to Linux 7.2.
• SMB/CIFS client and ksmbd are enabled on all Armbian kernels.
• Helios64 gains Wake-on-LAN through the PHY on 7.3.
• The RK3562 patch set is carried over from 7.2 to 7.3.
• Kernel headers packages now depend on python3-minimal.
• On Raspberry Pi (bcm2711), the official firmware is always used for start4.elf, and a second serial getty is no longer enabled on the UART.

Build framework and repository

• The production single-mode repo.sh is adopted into main, and the package repository is now published with Acquire-By-Hash.
• OCI storage is configurable, with a read-only OCI_PROXY used across CI workflows and runner cleanup.
• NXP firmware and Trusted Firmware sources are fetched from Armbian-hosted GitHub mirrors.
• A user patch can now override a core patch of the same name, and USERPATCHES_PATH works again.
• The build now stops with an error when a lib.config file is present, and an interactive shell extension was added.
• The stable repository is published only every STABLE_REPOSITORY_UPDATE days; mirror sync is verified by probing files.

For people running Armbian

• armbianmonitor was fully refactored.
• armbian-firstlogin no longer blocks an unattended preset run on questions and accepts underscores and hyphens in usernames.
• APT now waits on a lock and clears a stale cache lock, fixing the "held by process 0" error.
• Package removal uses purge instead of autopurge to stop cascade removals, and Watchtower is no longer offered for install.
• In the configng project: a read-only registry cache for ghcr.io, static IP setup aborts cleanly when the dialog is cancelled, and the tuning profile no longer undoes its own swappiness setting.

Documentation

• New pages cover OCI storage, unattended first login and how to install applications.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.