Radxa CM5 (RK3588S) as the compute module
An RK3588S module with up to 32 GB RAM on HackerGadgets' Radxa adapter: display, keyboard, USB and charging work, no onboard WiFi, mainline kernel since 2026.
What it takes
- Purchase required
- Disassembly
Difficulty 2 of 3 — moderate.
Details
hzykiss's image (January 2025, built from dev-null2019's radxa-cm5-uconsole work) was the first ready-to-flash system: display, keyboard, USB, power management, 4G and microSD work; the module has no WiFi or Bluetooth, so a USB adapter is needed, HDMI needed a hardware mod and audio was mono at best. Rex followed with a Bookworm 6.1.y image (March 2025: no audio, a ten-second power-button shutdown, the SDR/LoRa/GPS card stops it booting, use a 3 mm thermal pad, avoid the Lite variant without GPU), and randomlinuxuser posted an Arch image on the 6.1 vendor kernel (February 2026).
TDeval's mainline Linux 7.1/7.2 port (August 2026) drops the vendor BSP: both panel revisions with auto-detection, Mali-G610 through panthor/panfrost (glmark2 2270), Wayland, keyboard and trackball, Ethernet, eMMC/microSD/NVMe, charging, HDMI hot-plug; audio untested, backlight dimming and the charge LED still to do. James_Kent reported Trixie with kernel 7.1 running smoothly. The core directory still rates OS support 'poor', and the HackerGadgets Radxa adapter is required.
Links
Open at Forum threadRelated mods
vxi runs an Orange Pi CM5 (RK3588S) on kernel 6.16+ with a Gentoo patchset — a mainboard resistor swap, no WiFi, mono audio, and restarts that mostly fail.
A CM5 drops into the CM4 adapter for a faster CPU, up to 16 GB of RAM and USB 3.0 — get a Lite with WiFi, update its EEPROM, and mind the heat.
Every CM4 or CM5 sits on an adapter in the CM3 socket: the $19 open-source original, HackerGadgets' $23 board with NVMe and USB 3.0, or lulu's $20 CM5 kit.
trinity's reference table of every compute core that fits the uConsole — ISA, RAM, eMMC, WiFi, OS support, adapter needed or not — plus the adapter boards.
ClockworkPi's own RK3399 module — two Cortex-A72 plus four A53, Mali-T864, 4 GB — needs no adapter; $129, with a smaller but real software base.
A single-core 1 GHz RISC-V module with 1 GB and no GPU — a terminal machine with long battery life, now sold out, with a small but determined software scene.