Orange Pi 5

[NR1974]

Hello,

I have Orange Pi 5 with 16gb Ram, Can I install ESXI 7 ARM on it? If it is available can you tell me how to do it.

Thanks

[jhalderwcc]

I believe this just came out around last November. My understanding is that ESXi on ARM requires UEFI/ServerReady. It's glued on top of the Raspberry Pi 4, but is native on all other servers that will officially run the ESXi ARM fling.

I'm not seeing anything that alludes to the Orange Pi 5 supporting UEFI... Which sucks, this would check a lot of boxes for a homelab, or business using a couple as proof-of-concept, as they go up to 32GB of RAM and are significantly faster than the Pi4.

I also want to add that having UEFI guarantees nothing. I have a 4GB Samsung Galaxy Book Go that can't as much get into any aarch64 linux installer, or ESXi installer... Doesn't even show the bootloader.

[rennyfuchs]

There is a UEFI environment that can be loaded on the SD card, and that got me past the "boot from ISO" hurdle. When the modules start loading, I get a purple screen, "Cannot enable LPI or ITS-based MSI." It's unsupported hardware so I don't expect to get much further, but if anyone has suggestions I'm open to them! 🙂

[cyprienlaplace]

Hi Renny, that is good news to hear, there is an UEFI now 🙂

To help you get further, it will help a lot if you can get boot messages from the serial port. You will need to add "logPort=com1" on the boot command line if the graphical console is enabled.

I also suspect some issue related to the ACPI tables. Can you boot a Linux OS and use "acpidump -b" to dump the ACPI tables. You will have a few .dat files that will help us see how the hardware is presented to ESXi.

Thank you!
Cyprien

[rennyfuchs]

Hi Cyprien,

I've done more digging and I think the UEFI is still very new/underdeveloped, they're making leaps and strides but for instance, if I install Windows I need to use a USB to SATA converter as UEFI doesn't recognize the NVMe slot yet. I tried the Ubuntu image (which cannot be installed, but has to have the img written via dd to a disk) and they did not have the needed directories to run acpidump against. We may just have to wait while UEFI matures.

[Mr_Poo_Butthole]

I've got a 5B 16/128 enroute (again. thx USPS or chinapost) from Amazon and I'm curious if the uefi behaves any different on the soldered emmc? I guess I could look at their code but wheres the fun in that? Also I have a 8/64 parts queen if needed.

If I see something, I'll say something. Until then, CHEERS!

[rennyfuchs]

I was able to build a version of the edk2 firmware that allowed me to boot into the install environment. Notes say to disable PCI-e 3.0 - to do so, comment line 33 of this file before building it: https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588/blob/master/edk2-rockchip/Platform/OrangePi/OrangePi5/Ac...

Edit - more lines were added, currently it is line 36. If the file changes again, this is the line you want to comment out:

$(RK_COMMON_ACPI_DIR)/Pcie2x1l0.asl

Sadly, the onboard NIC isn't supported, and the USB NIC Fling isn't supported for ARM. I kept booting to the "No supported adapters, press enter to reboot" screen. I know that the Raspberry Pi supports the Realtek 8153 with the 0bda vendor ID so I tried connecting one but no luck; alt+F1 at the boot screen and "lsusb" confirmed it, no joy. For science, I tried injecting the USB NIC Fling anyway, the driver showed up in localcli software vib list, but alas, not to be.

I tried using an NVMe to PCi-e x4 adapter to connect a supported Intel NIC but it required a separate power supply. I don't think the Orange Pi liked that amount of electricity as it won't boot anymore. I'd say give it a pass until the USB NIC Fling gets ported over. In the mean time, Armbian works well and for the brief time that I had it, ran extremely well as a tiny web server.

[rennyfuchs]

Finally, I was able to get it to boot and install the fling to a USB SSD with an Orange Pi 5 Plus (the new one based on the RK3588, not the "S" version) and the customized UEFI firmware. The USB seems a bit more reliable on this board. Plugging in a USB hub to the USB-C port allowed me to connect a keyboard, Realtek 8153 USB NIC, and a USB SSD. I connected the install media to the top 3.0 port. Once installed, I switched the SSD into the top USB 3.0 port and kept the NIC on the USB-C port. 

The only USB port that seems to work once ESXi is installed is the USB-C port. The two USB 3.0 ports can be used as boot devices, but once ESXi is running they become read only and disappear from the USB device list. So the keyboard, USB NIC and USB device that you want to install ESXi on have to be on a single hub that run off of the USB-C port.

Progress has been made, for sure. Hopefully the next iteration of UEFI exposes the NVMe slot and VMware can utilize it. And better USB support would be good too, but these work fine in Armbian. 🙂 The team that has been working on developing the UEFI for these boards are awesome!

[Mr_Poo_Butthole]

Dude! Thats awesome news. Thank you for documenting your process so well. The level of detail is amazing and you should be commended for your valiant efforts as we learn more from detailed failures than half-assed successes.

keep on keepin on and I’ll stay tuned.

Ooooh weeee!

[cyprienlaplace]

This is great!!

Note that ESXi scheduling is not aware of the big.LITTLE configuration, and you might get some issues with that. It might not be too much visible if you keep the number of VCPUs low. You might want to fix the affinities of the VCPUs to the same cores. From the screenshot it looks like CPUs 0 to 3 are Cortex-A76, and CPUs 4 to 7 are the A55.

[norbss]

@rennyfuchs where did you got the UEFI Firmware from. I can find just the one for OPi 5 and that's it, I cannot find the one for OPi 5 Plus

[rennyfuchs]

Sorry for the late reply. The latest firmware can be found on the edk2 github: https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588

[cyprienlaplace]

There has been a Orange Pi 5 Plus with NVMe success 😄

https://x.com/vShoeStringLab/status/1735883684148863060?s=20

(direct link to blog post: https://blog.vshoestring.com/2023/12/esxi-on-arm-nvme-working-on-orange-pi-5.html)