“No bootable install method is available for /dev/sda on this system (no EFI firmware, no
GRUB, and no board u-boot support).”

I have tried both Debian and Ubuntu minimal images on vendor and current kernels.

I did have a FriendlyElec image on there before but used Rkdevtool to erase the UFS module prior to trying again with Armbian. I’m wondering if anyone has had success with this? I saw a thread with someone struggling with Btrfs but I’m not able to get ext4 working.

Any help or instructions is appreciated, thanks

I have a FriendlyElec NanoPi M5 and I want to play movies with it. But I want to squeeze everything out of this SBC ! So, I need hardware acceleration.

I tested first with a OS image downloaded from FriendlyElec and mpv and (almost) everything works well. The mpv working configuration is: hwdec=rkmpp, vo=gpu, gpu-api=opengl. But I don't like that OS for other reasons, so I switched to Armbian. I installed the image "Armbian 26.5.1 KDE Wayland (Ubuntu 26.04 - vendor 6.1.115)", then I installed mpv, but when I try to play movies, it says:

marus@nanopi-m5:/mnt/NAS/WDRed1/Samples/FullHD$ mpv --hwdec=rkmpp --vo=gpu --gpu-api=opengl H265.8bit.FullHD.1920x816.24fps.10Mbps.SDR.mkv
● Video  --vid=1  --vlang=eng  'Carlito's Way 1993' (hevc 1920x816 23.976 fps) [default]
● Audio  --aid=1  --alang=eng  'DDP 5.1 ch 640 Kb/s' (eac3 6ch 48000 Hz) [default]
Unsupported hwdec: rkmpp
AO: [pipewire] 48000Hz 5.1(side) 6ch floatp
VO: [gpu] 1920x816 yuv420p
AV: 00:00:14 / 00:01:59 (12%) A-V:  0.000 Cache: 104s/146MB
Exiting... (Quit)

It seems that this mpv doesn't know about rkmpp's existence... Strange ! What can I do ? 

Has anyone managed to play movies with mpv and full hardware acceleration on NanoPi M5 and Armbian OS?

## Problem

Gigabit RX is completely non-functional on `end0` (GMAC0, `ethernet@2a220000`). The interface comes up at 1000Mb/s, TX works, but no packets are ever received. DHCP never gets an OFFER, `ethtool -S end0` shows RX counters stuck at zero.

Forcing 100Mb/s via `ethtool -s end0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off` works around the issue — RX starts working immediately.

## Root cause

The DTB sets `phy-mode = "rgmii-id"` together with `rx_delay = <0x3f>`. The RTL8211F PHY in `-id` mode already applies its own internal RX delay, and the driver applies an additional hardware delay on top of it. The double delay breaks gigabit RX entirely.

```
# /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3576-nanopi-m5.dtb — broken
phy-mode = "rgmii-id";
tx_delay = <0x21>;
rx_delay = <0x3f>;   # <-- causes double RX delay
```

## Fix

Change `phy-mode` to `rgmii-rxid` (PHY applies RX delay internally) and remove `rx_delay`. This applies to both GMAC0 (`ethernet@2a220000`) and GMAC1 (`ethernet@2a230000`).

```
# Fixed
phy-mode = "rgmii-rxid";
tx_delay = <0x21>;
# rx_delay removed
```

After applying this fix gigabit works correctly at 1000Mb/s with full RX functionality.

## Workaround

```bash
ethtool -s end0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off
```

Or patch the DTB manually:

```bash
dtc -I dtb -O dts -o /tmp/nanopi.dts /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3576-nanopi-m5.dtb
sed -i 's/phy-mode = "rgmii-id"/phy-mode = "rgmii-rxid"/g' /tmp/nanopi.dts
sed -i '/rx_delay/d' /tmp/nanopi.dts
dtc -I dts -O dtb -o /boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3576-nanopi-m5.dtb /tmp/nanopi.dts
reboot
```