Armbian 22.02 Is Here with Official Raspberry Pi Support, UEFI Support, and More

Armbian 22.02

The Armbian community announced today the general availability of Armbian 22.02 as the latest stable release of this promising Debian and Ubuntu-based operating system for ARM devices.

Coming six months after Armbian 21.08, the Armbian 22.02 release is here to introduce initial support for Raspberry Pi devices. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B board is currently supported with 64-bit builds using Raspberry Pi Foundation’s kernels 5.15 LTS and 5.16, as well as Debian’s flash-kernel tool.

While the Raspberry Pi support is still marked as WIP (Work in Progress), it would appear that the community is reporting success in running Armbian on various 64-bit Raspberry Pi boards, including the older Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi CM3 and CM4.

But the work on the Raspberry Pi port is far from done, and the Armbian devs need your help to provide the community with a fully working port. For now, you can help by downloading and testing the official Raspberry Pi images, which are based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) (CLI only), as well as Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) with the Xfce desktop environment.

“We really hope the Raspberry Pi community gets involved! Armbian on RPi is only possible due to the most excellent mainlining efforts by that community (in fact, currently we’re building the kernel from raspberrypi/linux repo directly for our convenience — however, using mainline Linux is also possible using the build system),” said the devs.

Among other new features of the Armbian 22.02 release, there’s UEFI support for both AArch64 (ARM64) and x86 platforms by using the GRUB bootloader from Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu, there’s a new rolling-release version based on Debian Sid (Unstable), and the ODROID-N2(+) board has been moved to mainline u-boot.

On top of that, the devs announced a new framework to let users extend the Armbian build system independently from the core codebase, made some great improvements to the build automation (CI/CD) with extensive use of Github actions, and fixed countless bugs.

All the CURRENT Armbian 22.02 builds now use Linux kernel 5.15 LTS (with ZFS support), while the EDGE builds were upgraded to the newer Linux 5.16 kernel series. As expected, this enables support for more devices, such as the Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS board, as well as YT8531 and other MotorComm chips.

Last but not least, this release enables 3D support on the Debian-based builds, implements fan controller support for the NanoPi M2V2 board, and adds initial support for Ubuntu-based builds derived from the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS operating system series.

Last updated 2 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com