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Orange Pi 5 Plus (32 GB) — Ubuntu Images with NPU support

An Ubuntu Rockchip NPU image is just Ubuntu bundled with Rockchip’s vendor kernel (typically 5.10/6.1) and device trees that expose the NPU via the rknpu2 driver (e.g., /dev/rknpu). With that kernel, the system behaves like normal Ubuntu while user-space accesses the NPU through the RKNN runtime.

Out‑of‑the‑Box Images Tested

Tried the following images, written to the SD card with USBImage 1.0.10:

  • Armbian_25.5.1_Orangepi5-plus_noble_current_6.12.28.img.xz
  • Armbian_25.5.1_Orangepi5-plus_noble_vendor_6.1.115_kde-neon_desktop.img.xz
  • ubuntu-22.04-preinstalled-server-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img.xz
  • ubuntu-24.10-preinstalled-server-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img.xz

Result Summary

Orange Pi 5 Plus (32 GB), only one of the tested images exposed the NPU immediately after first boot, with no additional configuration required:

✅ ubuntu-22.04-preinstalled-server-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img.xz

The other images booted but did not show the NPU on first boot.

Verification Method

Observed NPU availability via cosmotop.exe.

Run as root fo NPU monitoring

wget https://github.com/bjia56/cosmotop/releases/download/v0.3.0/cosmotop.exe

Notes

I could have tested more images, but it’s time‑consuming. I have a working image now and can begin benchmarking the NPUs.

see also

Clone SD CARD(mmcblk1) to EMMC DRIVE(mmcblk0)