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.
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.
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
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
Their website doesn't answer the obvious question: what is it, and how is it different from vanilla debian? Do you know?
Vanilla Debian will not run on your nice and shiny Radxa Rocks 5B or Banana Pi whatever.
Why not? What's missing?
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.
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
Pretty much, plus their little configuration utility for loading dtb overlays among other things.
> 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?
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)
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.
> 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.
Completely agree. I use it on my old PINE64 and it keeps on ticking.
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.
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.
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...
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.