Introduction

Linux for ARM development boards

Preface

Welcome to the official documentation of Armbian Linux, a highly optimized base operating system specialized for single board computers (SBCs) and its extensive build framework.

How is the documentation structured?

The table of contents in the sidebar and the links at the top of the page should let you easily access the documentation for your topic of interest.

If you are new to Armbian, the Introduction and the Getting Started sections provide everything you need to know about the project, where to find the resources for your board, and a tutorial for everything you need to get Armbian running.

It then continues on to Configuration tasks and tools to customize your installation, e.g. change the network address, start or stop services like SSH, or install one of the many prepared software stacks. This section and the links contained in it are useful to all user levels.

Advanced users will find more complex topics in the Advanced section, including how to customize your initial installation.

If you have read through the documentation and still need help, check out our Troubleshooting advice.

Where to find additional help?

If you still cannot find what you need here, visit the Armbian forum where your input can also help us improving this documentation.

How to report a problem in this documentation?

If you come across an issue in these pages, you can either report it here, or follow these instructions to suggest a fix yourself.

What is Armbian?

Armbian’s goal is to provide a highly optimized base operating system specialized for single board computers. It embodies extremely lightweight hardware features with a well-known and supported Debian-based user-space experience, an extensive build framework, and it is suitable for industrial or home use.

Armbian is not a Linux distribution itself. Instead, we use Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu Linux as base for the images, that our users can download and deploy. We build our own set of optimized kernels for each board, and then provide an extensive and customizable framework to build, adjust, and configure these images. This framework is the heart of the project.

graph LR
  A[Hardware] --> B{50 x Armbian kernel};
  B --> X["point release"];
  X ---->|minimal| E[Debian or Ubuntu];
  X ---->|server| F[Debian or Ubuntu];
  X -->|desktop| H[Debian or Ubuntu];
  H -->Q[XFCE];
  H -->W[Gnome];
  H -->R[KDE];
  H -->T[Cinnamon];

Key features

As a user, you can simply download one of our images, deploy and run it on your SBC. As an advanced user, a manufacturer or provider, you can create fully configured custom images for your board or product.

In any case, you will get these key advantages:

• you get a lean and standard Debian or Ubuntu based user space with the well known APT package manager
• we provide independent kernel development and maintenance with long term support
• we provide an extensive build framework with fast hybrid assembly of the whole operating system and endless capabilities
• we provide advanced hardware and OS configuration and software installation with the built-in armbian-config tool
• we provide exclusive support for exotic hardware that nobody else supports
• we provide stabilized point and rolling distribution of upgrades and OS images
• we provide a global download infrastructure with perfect coverage, also in China mainland
• we provide an extensive build infrastructure to assist in CI automation
• we do daily automated stress and upgrade testing on key hardware targets
• we have strong ties to embedded Linux

Other features and performance tweaks worth mentioning

• Images are highly compressed and automatically expand across the boot media at first boot
• Preinstalled standard system utilities like BASH or ZSH shell
• Login is possible via serial, HDMI/VGA or SSH
• Custom login MOTD showing a collection of important information
• /var/log is mounted as compressed device (zram, lzo) and the log2ram service saves the logs to disk daily and on shutdown
• Half of the memory is allocated/extended for/with compressed zswap
• /tmp is mounted as tmpfs (and can be optionally compressed)
• Browser profile memory caching is enabled on desktop images
• Optimized IO scheduler (check /etc/init.d/armhwinfo)
• Journal data writeback is enabled (/etc/fstab)
• Ethernet interrupts are using a dedicated core

Comparison

Distributions	Armbian	Downstream	Upstream
Primary focus	making a value	sales, profiting	making a value
User-space	clean & minimal	bloated with proprietary scripts	clean
Experience across hardware	universal, predictable, reproducible	random, chaotic, manually assembled	porting, unofficial builds
Contributing to FOSS	extreme	close to none	great
System config	universal	proprietary	all / none
Maintenance	modular with review and unit tests	endless spaghetti code	traditional and modern
Build framework	advanced and user friendly	none	none
Hardware maintainers	50+, teams per SoC, per vendor	none	none
Upstream contribution	1000+	none	little
Downstream projects	10+	none	100+
Switching to upstream	easy	impossible	/
User-space changes	standard	proprietary	standard
Initial memory usage	optimal	bad	bad
Process usage	optimal	only hidden	too broad
Pre-installed packages	optimized for fast install	makes install of anything slower	optimized for fast install
Declaring support	where we know maintainers	everything is “supported”	everything is “supported”

Which hardware is supported?

Armbian distributes stable images for many different single board computers (SBCs). But not each model receives the same amount of support and maintenance. This might be due to lack of man-power, lack of support by the manufacturer, etc. We have therefore a system that shows the support status for each board:

Platinum Support

At least one person is providing constant maintainance and support.

Standard Support

Support is not secured, but it is still overall good.

Community maintained

Most of the images for boards in this category will also work, but no warranty can be given as Armbian does not monitor their status.

Supported / maintained is not a guarantee, though. It merely implies that a particular SBC is at a high level of software maturity and has a named maintainer. Due to the complexity and lack of cooperation in the ecosystem, it is unlikely that all specialized functionalities (like 3D, VE, I²C…) are always available.

For more information see the Board Support Guide

Where to find images and sources?

Our main website is https://www.armbian.com/. It is the default site for our users, and it contains the download section with all images, information about the support status for each board, links to our forum and this documentation.

The project sources are hosted on GitHub and are organized in separate Git repositories. These are the resources for developers and participants, e.g. users helping with testing.

How can you contribute?

Software titles

You can quickly and easily install popular software! They are ready to run and optimized for Armbian. Here are few highlights:

• Desktops - install desktop environments
• Netconfig - network tools
• DevTools - development
• Benchy - system benchmaking and diagnostics
• Containers - containerization and virtual machines
• Media - media servers and editors
• Management - remote management tools

Unit testing

All software targets and functions are automatically tested to catch as many problems as possible.