NovKernel — a CM5 kernel with suspend support
paragonnov's 6.12.y kernel build for the CM5 uConsole adds pm_suspend and performance tuning, installed as a .deb on Rex's Bookworm.
What it takes
- Software only
Difficulty 1 of 3 — easy.
Details
NovKernel (March 2025) is a Raspberry Pi 6.12.y kernel with paragonnov's changes for the CM5: suspend via pm_suspend, transparent huge pages, and working WiFi/Bluetooth, RP1 audio, panel and backlight, HDMI, USB and battery charging with the LED. It installs as a Debian package on Bookworm, or by hand from a tarball on other distributions.
Force-off and the 4G expansion were not working at release, Kali's filesystem layout caused trouble, and the author's warning is blunt: back up first and know how to recover a kernel. It pairs with the same author's uConsole-Sleep scripts, covered under Power.
Links
Open at Forum threadRelated mods
OuinOuin74's pacman kernel packages for the uConsole track the Pi kernel from 6.16.y to 7.0.x; wtsh's fork adds Rex's new panel driver and Ethernet.
The community's recommended OS: Debian 13 on Rex's patched Pi kernel, desktop and Lite variants, for CM3+, CM4, CM4S and CM5.
The previous Debian release of Rex's line, still rebuilt for the new screens in 2026 — the fallback when something on Trixie is not ready yet.
Rex's Kali image for CM4 and CM5 on the uConsole kernel with the hardware presets; cuu's original CM4 build is documented on the ClockworkPi wiki.
Rex's Parrot OS build for CM3/CM4/CM5 in Home and Security editions, plus krokowitz's Security spin with RTL-SDR and ALFA drivers preinstalled.
Rex's build of DragonOS Pi64 — an Ubuntu 22.04 SDR distribution with the radio tools preinstalled — on the uConsole kernel for CM4 and CM5.