Armbian 21.05 Released with Support for Linux Kernel 5.11, Orange Pi R1 Plus

Armbian 21.05

The Armbian devs released today the Armbian 21.05 update to their Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for ARM and embedded devices, including development boards and Linux phones.

More than three months in the works, Armbian 21.05 is here as a worthy upgrade to version 21.02 with support for the Linux 5.11 kernel series, support for the Orange Pi R1 Plus open-source single-board computer, improved NVIDIA Jetson Nano support, as well as improved support for the Desktop images.

Yes, that’s right, Armbian can also run on desktop computers powered by ARM processors, such as PINE64’s Pinebook Pro laptop, not only embedded devices or Linux phones. The Armbian team did a great job improving desktop support by adding additional desktop configurations for use with their new framework and implemented a Jira-based checklist for testing the Desktop images.

Among other changes, Armbian 21.05 improves support for the Banana Pi BPI M3, Firefly, Odroid N2+, ODROID-XU4, ROCKPro64, NanoPi K2, NanoPi M4V2, and Tinker Board single-board computers, enables native ARM and ARM64 building, adds a few missing packages and additonal mirrors for linux-firmware, and enables hardware PRNG/TRNG/SHA on the sun8i-ce platform.

Support for the Realtek 8811CU and RTL8188EU wireless drivers was improved as well in this new Armbian release, which also improves support for the GNOME desktop environment, enables USB-C DisplayPort and eDP outputs on the NanoPC-T4 board, resolves GPIO and PWM patches for the mvebu SoC, and adds multimedia and OC overlays for the Rockchip RK3399 processor.

Of course, numerous bugs were fixed to improve support for existing platforms and the overall stability and reliability of the ARM distribution. For more details on these bug fixes, check out the full changelog.

If you want to use Armbian on your ARM device, do visit the official website to download the 21.05 release for your development board, desktop computer, or Linux phone. Armbian is currently supported on 134 devices.

Last updated 3 years ago

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