Feature Request: Orange Pi 5 Ultra

[moo-the-cow]

Feature Description

There is no armbian version for the orange pi 5 ultra. and the stock noble image provided by rockchip is kind of bad, for example the u-boot SPI flash does not really work to boot into emmc or nvme and of course they only released a "it kinda" works version and stopped.

some infos on that:
http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiwiki/index.php/Orange_Pi_5_Ultra
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/service-and-support/Orange-Pi-5-Ultra.html

[sonny486]

Same, would love to have an OrangePi 5 Ultra version. Tried the Max image on the Ultra, it did boot, but never completed

[moo-the-cow]

yeah I saw the other locked thread. people act like it's something trivial, so this armbian custom "build" does not even boot.
I don't want to use another boards image, because there are differences in board hardware layouts.
It will be sure a challenge, which is why I suspect there nothing yet on armbian side

[mark-kazakov]

@sonny486 on my side the max image works well on the ultra, but maybe missing hardware features.
In general a lot of work on the os is missing on the ultra on the kernel side. There are a lot of projects working on rk3588, like collabora, armbian, some mainline work as well:
https://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2025/07/rockchip-npu-update-6-we-are-in-mainline.html
but yeah a really big community effort has to be done.
personally I attempt to make a custom system only for orange pi 5 ultra, but the task is really big.
What features do you miss in the current os?

[moo-the-cow]

the current one (xunlong orangepi) is on jammy/jellyfish (22.04). it's rather outdated, the only feature I miss though is the nvme and emmc, could be simply a u-boot issue. and hardware video encoding/decoding will be important to me (server minimal is fine).

so I am really at a "beginner" level and not so deep into all that, that is why I was asking for some help.
I do understand it's more than just building it having "default" settings. like I've rewritten the xunlong build script so it will actually build for noble, but it didn't boot. most likely some important kernel configs missing.

right, I should post sources: https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong/orangepi-build
also the modified version: https://github.com/moo-the-cow/orangepi-build

what's interesting is that they had in part already configured this for "noble" but I think they just stopped all of a sudden. pretty lame

why was I posting it here? maybe joshua has a clue and automated this kind of stuff - worst case: gets rejected
I mean - the core meaning of this repo is providing images (not giving support) I think that distinction is important to not have another burn-out

[mark-kazakov]

@moo-the-cow,
I don't know about the emmc, since it requires a separate module. Though you have 16MB nor storage on the board.
You can use the nvme if you mean by that using it as a root file system. You can follow this guide, by adapting it to your use case.

• Orange Pi 5 NVMe/SATA SSD Boot Guide
  I hope this will help

[moo-the-cow]

no the same actually applies to nvme, which btw I also tried.
I also tried to create a custom orange pi 5 ultra build based on the joshua riek build scripts, but I failed, because simply I lack some of the necessary knowledge

[AButenko]

+1 would be nice to have a ready-to-use image

[TrevTrev84]

Dietpi uses a Bootloader file stored on emmc to boot nvme... maybe this is the way