I upgraded my ROCK5B in-place from Armbian Bookworm beta to Armbian Testing/Trixie beta and it turns out that no Ambian packages are seen (so not updated). The Debian Trixie packages do upgrade, as for example I just saw while doing full-upgrade:

libavif16:arm64 (1.2.1-1.2) over (1.2.1-1.1) ...
 

I thought something with my install, but also downloaded 'Armbian_25.8.0-trunk.50_Rock-5b_trixie_vendor_6.1.115_minimal.img' yesterday and it has the same issue (quick test via systemd-nspawn container on loopdev mounted image).

 

My goal is at least to figure out what is best bootloader and kernel for the ROCK5B. So far I simply copied/cloned  Armbian Bookworm rootfs from ROCK3A+NanoPi-R6C and did some ROCK5B specific changes like U-Boot, but not much more and it actually is already good enough.

But before the ROCK5B becomes a 24/7 headless workhorse with long uptime, I thought better to prepare/check for newer Linux or potential issues. I already upgraded some other devices from Bookworm->Trixie and that is quite an improvement, for example KDE 6 performs much better/nicer than KDE5 in Bookworm. It currently uses U-Boot 'edge' and 'current' kernel and very important for me, both the 'vendor' and 'mainline current/edge' overlay for SERDES multi-PHY SATA on the M.2 E-key work (and also the NVMe keeps working).  I need to drill a hole in the Radxa aluminum cooling case for the SATA cable (and serial console cable), that needs some time first.

 

I can build and install U-Boot and kernel etc manually of -course, but i wonder why Armbian packages are not visible. Is it as expected or is something wrong? I assume it is just too early yet and that it is work in progress.

 

I think maybe policies are an issue, but don't understand what it could be. Maybe someone has a hint.

 

root@rock-5b:~# apt policy
Package files:
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
    release a=now
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie/non-free-firmware arm64 Packages
    release o=Debian,a=testing,n=trixie,l=Debian,c=non-free-firmware,b=arm64
    origin deb.debian.org
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie/non-free arm64 Packages
    release o=Debian,a=testing,n=trixie,l=Debian,c=non-free,b=arm64
    origin deb.debian.org
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie/contrib arm64 Packages
    release o=Debian,a=testing,n=trixie,l=Debian,c=contrib,b=arm64
    origin deb.debian.org
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie/main arm64 Packages
    release o=Debian,a=testing,n=trixie,l=Debian,c=main,b=arm64
    origin deb.debian.org
500 https://beta.armbian.com trixie/trixie-desktop all Packages
    release o=Armbian,a=trixie,n=trixie,l=Armbian,c=trixie-desktop,b=all
    origin beta.armbian.com
500 https://beta.armbian.com trixie/trixie-desktop arm64 Packages
    release o=Armbian,a=trixie,n=trixie,l=Armbian,c=trixie-desktop,b=arm64
    origin beta.armbian.com
500 https://beta.armbian.com trixie/trixie-utils all Packages
    release o=Armbian,a=trixie,n=trixie,l=Armbian,c=trixie-utils,b=all
    origin beta.armbian.com
500 https://beta.armbian.com trixie/trixie-utils arm64 Packages
    release o=Armbian,a=trixie,n=trixie,l=Armbian,c=trixie-utils,b=arm64
    origin beta.armbian.com
500 https://github.armbian.com/configng stable/main arm64 Packages
    release o=armbian.github.io/configurator,n=stable,l=armbian.github.io/configurator,c=main,b=arm64
    origin github.armbian.com
Pinned packages:

 

Armbian packages get updated now, so now upgrading to 25.8.0-trunk.100, from .87 I did earlier yesterday. Also now running 6.15.0-edge-rockchip64 with EDK2-UEFI v1.1 in SPI. Need setting to DeviceTree as the default (Both = ACPI and DeviceTree) seems to confuse 6.15.0-edge-rockchip64, got only serial console only or stall somewhere in boot process.