As of early 2026, Joshua Riek's ubuntu still offered the best hardware acceleration using the NPU, GPU (and VPU?) of the rk3588. Some accels were only in the Desktop image. For applications like Frigate, a server might want hwaccel but no GUI. This is a stab at that.
By no means is this optimized, but it boots up using 325 MB of RAM and settles to 0.00 cpu. The image size is surprisingly larger than the original: 2.6 GB gz compressed image vs 1.0 GB (server) and 1.7 GB (desktop) xz compressed files.
- unattended-upgrades is still on,
- I didn't pay any attention to wireless, but set netplan to DHCD both ethernet ports (no NetworkManger here),
- sound is similarly minimal, with wireplumber/pipewire installed
I'm not very experienced with hardware acceleration or with SBCs. I had been using Joshua's server image and noticed it did not pass all the tests that people mention when trying to get the most out of their hardware. There was mention that the desktop image had more of that enabled. The server images boots with an ssh server available. The desktop image requires use of an HDMI screen and keyboard, and likely a mouse. ===================(What does this do?)====================== [So far it boots into my installation, how to reset it?]
$ uname -r 6.1.0-1025-rockchip ^ same one as on Joshua's desktop image. The server image appears to be just a slightly differernt configuration, it's version number includes 1026 instead of 1025.
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCC This was from an upgrade after making the image CCCCCCCCCCCCCCC $ cat /etc/lsb-release DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=26.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=resolute DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon (development branch)" ^ Oops! I wanted podman >= 5 so I could use quadlets, or .container files to create/document containers
$ ffmpeg -hide_banner -hwaccels Hardware acceleration methods: vdpau cuda vaapi drm opencl vulkan rkmpp
$ ls /dev/dri/ by-path card0 card1 renderD128 renderD129
$ ls /dev/video* /dev/video-dec0 /dev/video-enc0
$ ls /dev/rknpu ls: cannot access '/dev/rknpu': No such file or directory
but...
debug showing load