Early May brought another round of steady advancements to the Armbian project, with progress in U-Boot updates, board enablement, firmware fixes, and notable improvements to Armbian’s growing catalog of self-hosted applications.

Bootloader and Firmware Enhancements

Several platforms saw significant U-Boot improvements. The Cherryba-M1 now benefits from an upgraded U-Boot and reorganized patch structure, thanks to Igor‘s work on upgrading Cherryba-M1 to latest u-boot and moving patch to new folder. Andy bumped U-Boot to v2025.04 for the Lubancat2, keeping the board current. The Radxa Rock 4 SE also migrated to this version, where Niklas refined its configuration and boot behavior.

Meanwhile, the Khadas VIM3 received a broader bootloader overhaul led by Ricardo, introducing SD-first boot order, squashfs and fileenv support, and enhanced compatibility with Home Assistant OS in a comprehensive update to U-Boot for Khadas VIM3.

Older configurations didn’t go unnoticed: Igor removed deprecated ATF tags for sun50iw9 / H61x, while Olaf pushed the sunxi64 platform to the latest LTS version of ATF.

Expanding Device Support

Armbian continues to grow its ecosystem. Rolf introduced official support for the Banana Pi M2+, making it easier for users to deploy on this compact board. On the RISC-V side, libiunc brought the kernel for the StarFive2 platform up to v6.6, ensuring ongoing support and compatibility.

Installer Improvements and Runtime Fixes

Improving install experience, Igor Velkov added Btrfs root subvolume support when installing to NVMe, paving the way for better snapshot and maintenance workflows. Igor also corrected missing Broadcom firmware for Raspberry Pi boards to fix wireless support and suppressed firmware warnings related to built-in Realtek USB network drivers, helping clean up logs and reduce confusion.

Self-Hosted App Catalog Grows

The list of installable apps during Armbian setup has expanded. Two powerful platforms are now just a selection away:

  • Immich, a self-hosted photo and video backup system, was added with the introduction of Immich to configNG.

  • NetBox, a leading infrastructure resource management solution, joined the roster in the addition of NetBox to Armbian configNG.

Both are available via the configNG provisioning interface.

Deprecations and Housekeeping

Support for legacy distributions has now ended: Debian Bullseye and Ubuntu Focal and Jammy will no longer receive repository updates, as noted in the userspace status change to EOS.

Elsewhere, dependency and CI maintenance continued. Automated tools like Dependabot bumped packages such as setuptools and GitHub actions for changed-files, while amazingfate restored support for the AIC8800 Wi-Fi driver by reverting a mistaken disable.

Further Reading

Explore the full range of updates in the official Armbian snapshot.