Armbian 22.02 has been released [LWN.net]

The Armbian project, which is a Debian-based distribution for Arm-based single-board computers (SBCs) and development boards, has a lengthy release announcement for Armbian 22.02. Beyond lots of updates and bug fixes (of course), Armbian has added support for Debian unstable ("sid"), Raspberry Pi images, a new Extensions build framework, build automation (continuous integration and continuous deployment) improvements, and more. There is also upcoming support for Ubuntu 22.04 images.

Historically, in many cases board manufacturers have been ‘maintaining’ (in parallel) some heavily patched Linux kernel which have diverged so far from mainline as to be considered an entirely different operating system. That mess, is what some refer to as a Board Support Package (BSP), ‘legacy’ kernel, or ‘vendor’ bootloader.
Those sources get ‘thrown over the wall’ upon release, very often never to be touched again. They are full of proprietary code (binary blobs), dirty hacks, ancient kernels, and all manner of other garbage that will never see the light of day in mainline Linux. All of which is very similar to the situation on Android, if you know anything about that.
In fact, if not for projects like Armbian, our SBCs would likewise become throwaway devices, too — just like your Android — in pretty short order. That is, if you ever even got them to work in the first place.

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Posted Feb 28, 2022 22:49 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

Apologies for being somewhat off-topic, but the contrast on that Armbian announcement page is just terrible... I could barely read the text. I had to enable my Dark Reader add-on to be able to read the announcement.

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Posted Mar 1, 2022 0:04 UTC (Tue) by TRSx80 (guest, #157171) [Link]

Thanks for the heads up, we are looking into it!

I did not even notice, as I use Dark Reader everywhere and by default!

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Posted Mar 2, 2022 7:49 UTC (Wed) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (1 responses)

Indeed it's really painful, I can't manage to stay focused on it, light gray on white :-(. Will come back later once fixed.

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Posted Mar 2, 2022 8:12 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Have you tried Reader mode? Or the Dark Reader extension?

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 1, 2022 3:33 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (6 responses)

Is there anyone working on solving the problem that Armbian exists as a workaround for? i.e. is anyone looking at vendor BSPs and rewriting/mainlining everything they add support for?

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 1, 2022 13:57 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (4 responses)

Probably not. These boards and chips are 'meant' to have a 1-2 year 'production lifetime' so by the time the chip is in the 'real-world' it is already EOL at its design firm and replaced by whatever chip is meant to be put out in the next 2 year timeframe. So you generally end up with 1-2 developers interested in 'this one particular board with this one particular firmware' because they have it and 1-2 developers interested in what they think is the same board but finding quickly that it was 'reved' and isn't close to what the other one is.

The only way to play the game is either make the opening move (make sure the code is open before it leaves the design shop) or not play it all (aka WarGames).

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 1, 2022 14:17 UTC (Tue) by TRSx80 (guest, #157171) [Link] (3 responses)

Your general thrust is not wrong, however there is wide disparity between manufacturers and boards in this regard.

For example, on the 'worst' end of the spectrum, Armbian do not officially support[0] any kind of 'TV box' because of exactly the sort of problems you describe (random hardware, often without even a change in revision!).

Then in the middle you have most of what Armbian decides to 'support' which are things with reliable, known hardware revisions. Which is one of the criteria for considering support in the first place (along with resources, interested developer, etc.).

And then on the other end, there are actually a few boards which have been explicitly declared as Long Term Supply (LTS), with a usually reliable guarantee of availability for 5 or more years.

That's the thing about Armbian, we support so many boards (over 100) there really are a lot of differences between all of them.

[0] But there are an amazing group of guys who relish a challenge and we give them their own sub-forum to do so: https://forum.armbian.com/forum/24-tv-boxes/

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 2, 2022 16:00 UTC (Wed) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link] (2 responses)

Thanks for your explanations!

How can someone find out about the good boards and vendors (except by looking for the offerings of the sponsors)?

I've consulted the webpages, the FAQ and a search engine and did not find an easy answer.

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 2, 2022 23:25 UTC (Wed) by TRSx80 (guest, #157171) [Link] (1 responses)

Unfortunately, there is no single place to point to which summarizes the information. I used to point people to the Downloads page for Supported devices[0] which made a pretty good 'short list' (and still does) but it is more nuanced than that.

We have historically used the term 'Supported' to sort of cover a lot of the criteria mentioned above, but to me that's too vague and covers too many things and has it's own problems (people think we are a 'support' forum for manufacturer, lol).

So I have proposed instead we present some small number if indices, say 1-5 stars or something equally easy to comprehend at a glance, which we would feature prominently on the board pages. The indices could be things like freedom/blobs, vendor support, mainline support, lifetime, etc. and have some corresponding documentation explaining what how many stars means exactly for each criteria. Or something like that.

In the meantime the best thing to do is probably stop by the forums[1] and make a thread about what you might be looking for and hopefully get some feedback tailored to your needs.

[0] https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported
[1] https://forum.armbian.com/

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 8, 2022 17:23 UTC (Tue) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link]

How about a badge system ? You could have some badges for:
- vendor supported
- all devices have drivers
- no binary blobs
- mainlined

etc.

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 1, 2022 14:05 UTC (Tue) by TRSx80 (guest, #157171) [Link]

Well what you describe is non-trivial, and thus is essentially the /raison d'être/ for Armbian in the first place. Most vendors just want to sell hardware, doing the absolute minimum software development possible, because that costs money.

Perhaps more accurately, individuals (and some companies) here and there (i.e., "the community") have been doing this mainlining work slowly but steadily for years to improve the situation. Armbian does some of it, too.

So, things have slowly improved over the 9 years Armbian have been in action. Mainline is becoming more expected, we even worked with some vendors to implement it for a few boards. So, increasing end user awareness and pressure on vendors I think is helping in this regard.

A few vendors lately are beginning to go to the trouble to use UEFI instead of u-boot for example, but that requires more work on their part to implement, which is why you see less of it. But that's why we are starting to support that.

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 1, 2022 22:22 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (4 responses)

On the topic of the breakage mentioned in the post, has Armbian looked at the LAVA project from Linaro? I think it is designed exactly for this use-case; automated testing of Linux kernel updates on SBCs and ARM devboards. If you aren't using it already, I expect it will help you increase reliability and reduce the need for lots of manual testing work.

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 2, 2022 23:29 UTC (Wed) by TRSx80 (guest, #157171) [Link] (3 responses)

I plan on making a post about this in our Development sub-forum. I personally have not heard of it, but maybe some of developers have.

We were developing our own solution[0] but unfortunately has been languishing for lack of resources.

So, who knows, maybe what you said is better idea, I will present it to the rest of the gang and see what they say. Thanks for the pointer.

[0] https://github.com/armbian/autotests

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 3, 2022 0:30 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

autotests seems to be for individual contributors to run? (it emphasises not sending data anywhere)

I'm not really familiar with it, but I think LAVA is more intended for having centralised aggregation of test data. The architecture diagram seems to allow multiple sites for hosting devices under test, all sending test data back to the centralised instance. Sending data back might be optional, not sure. All of LAVA is also available in Debian and the packages are supported by Linaro employees, as well as the upstream development of course.

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 3, 2022 17:08 UTC (Thu) by igorp (guest, #157226) [Link] (1 responses)

Hi @pabs and thanks for bringing this up.

I am aware for existence of those tools, but ... There are a few others, we tried some, but things usually stops at organising activities and find right people who will be develop procedures and operating with those tools. Since we are unable to setup proper complicated testing facility, we did setup at least a simple one. The one TRS-80 already mentioned and another more primitive one.

It is / can be attached to our CI. Each time a code is changed (we are primary interested in HW realted bugs, flashing, upgrades, etc., to produce something stable or at least that we can write down "its unstable"), code loaded on a bunch of devices, run upgrade, power cycle if failed ... https://github.com/armbian/scripts/actions/runs/1709203416 Its pretty basic. More complicated testing is runs manually and a lot more complicated is out of our reach. Project is too small and can't afford to bring that up. Nobody outside is interested to help - users want stability, but are not willing to help, vendors are long gone and selling a new device ...

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 3, 2022 22:47 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Your test procedures do sound pretty good already, but there is always room for improvement.

The ARM world is large, but it seems many groups are working separately instead of collectively across project boundaries. Unfortunately Debian doesn't have a LAVA setup so we can't help much. The Debian u-boot maintainer has a lot of boards where they and others manually test u-boot uploads and record results on the wiki. I wonder if Linaro could help by offering access to their setup or adding more boards to their mainline setup or similar. There are probably other groups with similar test setups to Armbian.

https://wiki.debian.org/U-boot/Status

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 3, 2022 0:34 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

If you aren't already and if there are any parts of Armbian that might be suitable for including in Debian (such as new board flashing tools, other new packages, Linux kernel or u-boot/etc build config options to enable boards or features of boards), please do send them back to Debian. For Linux/u-boot options, send the details via reportbug, or for packages see the new maintainers guide.

https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers/

Armbian folks might also want to join the #debian-arm IRC channel and the debian-arm mailing list and introduce themselves in both.