I want to use my orange pi 5 plus to with archlinux arm. I tried toying with the generic image but cannot get it to boot past a text message telling me the EFI stub loaded and the EDK2 firmware handed control off to the kernel. nothing loads or progresses.

Fedora can work, but I want to do things with the system I think its going to dislike, like use bcachefs with DKMS for root and divide the filesystem up into neat little subvolumes I can snapshot and rollback instantly whenever I might need to. I also want a VM running openWRT on there for routing which means I need PCI passthru and isolation from the host for the VM. arch has excellent documentation that easy to understand while fedora has never been quite as accessible to me.

But arch only has support for x86 and the arm variant does have a big a community to provide support so I’m kind of stuck on getting the install USB to just boot.

I also considered debian, but this soc still has things being added into mainline to enable hardware support, and I actually do want to use that NPU but it wont be avaliable outside the sketchy vendor kernel until late this year/early next so something using fresher kernels is kind of a must here.

So it looks like i need ot make archlinuxarm work here but I have to get the install USB to boot first and I’m stumped why I cant.