OS on Sovol on mainline Klipper

Easy install

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Easy install — for most people#

The clean-slate page bakes everything into the image offline, by hand. You don’t have to. There’s a friendlier path: flash a base image, let it come up, and answer a short wizard over SSH — the same first-run experience as any Armbian board. No ext4 editing, no debugfs.

Two facts make this easy on the Zero:

The board has a microSD slot, and the H616 boots SD before eMMC. So you can run the whole thing from a microSD — no reader, no pulling the module, no risk to the stock eMMC. Leave the eMMC alone as a factory backup, or move the system onto it later.
The first SSH login runs Armbian’s friendly setup wizard (armbian-firstlogin): it makes you change the root password, creates your user, and asks locale + timezone — right there in the SSH session.

Use the Sovobian image for all of these — it’s upstream Armbian CB1 with the 40 MHz eMMC overlay already baked, and it ships the 6.12.68 kernel where onboard Ethernet works out of the box. A plain BTT CB1 image drives the eMMC at 3× the validated clock (see the CB1 difference) — don’t use it.

Vanilla Armbian

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vanilla Armbian on the Sovol Zero board#

The Klipper migration leaves Sovol’s stock OS image untouched — Klipper lives in /home/sovol, so swapping the Klipper layer never rewrites the rootfs or the bootloader. For a fully vendor-free machine the last layer is the OS on the eMMC. This is the harder, destructive step (it rewrites the whole boot device).

This is a verified end-to-end recipe for vanilla Armbian on the stock 8 GB eMMC module — no custom OS build, no replacement module. The original Armbian-on-Zero walkthrough is asnajder/zero-config, which this builds on; where the two disagree (most notably on the 8 GB module), the difference is explained below.

Clean-slate (eMMC reader)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Clean-slate install with an eMMC reader#

The cleanest OS path: pull the eMMC module, flash it offline in a USB reader, bake in everything first boot needs, and power up a configured machine. This is the exact sequence used to (re)build the reference machine — twice — so every step has survived contact with reality.

Prerequisites: the eMMC module in a USB reader, a Linux machine or VM for the offline edits (macOS cannot write ext4 — see the offline-edit note below), and the MCUs already on mainline Katapult + Klipper (see MCU migration). If the MCUs ran mainline before, they still do — layer 2 survives layer 3.

In place, no eMMC reader

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reprovisioning the OS without an eMMC reader#

No reader, and you don’t want to pull the module? You can put a fresh OS on the eMMC from the running board. The trick is the microSD slot: the H616 boots SD before eMMC, so you boot a fresh image from a card and clone it onto the eMMC from there.

There is no shortcut over USB — the board exposes no USB-C / OTG port, so the usual sunxi-fel + U-Boot ums route to reach the eMMC over USB is off the table (see why FEL is out). SD-boot-and-clone is the only no-reader path.

Updatable Armbian

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Keeping Armbian updatable#

The worry that an apt upgrade will “lose the dts” and break the eMMC is mostly unfounded, and the real constraint is narrower than it looks. This page separates the two.

Experimental in one place. Everything about why the kernel is held is confirmed and documented. The path off the hold (moving to a newer kernel and keeping onboard Ethernet) is not yet verified on the Zero — it’s flagged below. Take a full backup before testing it.

Recovery

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Recovery and backups#

What makes every step in every path reversible, and how to get back a machine that won’t boot. Recovery is mostly a backup story: take the right snapshots before you touch anything, and a dead layer becomes a restore instead of a rebuild.

Back up first — the checklist#

Take these before erasing anything. They are what make each later step reversible.

The vendor stack (file-level, resumable rsync — not a raw dd over WiFi): vendor ~/klipper as a git bundle, ~/printer_data/config, ~/printer_data/build/*.bin, and the per-chip build configs ~/klipper/.config* (useful seeds even though their flash offsets are stale).