Building UEFI Firmware for the OrangePi 3B (RK3566)

Introduction

A few days ago (2026-08-05), Proxmox VE officially announced Arm64 support. That reminded me of the OrangePi 3B my lab seniors gave me, so I figured I would try booting Proxmox VE’s native ISO on it. The official images need to be booted via EFI, and after searching around I found that nobody had built UEFI firmware specifically for the OrangePi 3B, so I decided to compile it myself.

Environment

       _,met$$$$$gg.             nanami114@VM-Main 
    ,g$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$P.          ----------------- 
  ,g$$P"        """Y$$.".        OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13.4 (trixie) x86_64 
 ,$$P'              `$$$.        Host: KVM/QEMU (Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996) pc-i440fx-11.0) 
',$$P       ,ggs.     `$$b:      Kernel: 6.12.74+deb13+1-amd64 
`d$$'     ,$P"'   .    $$$       Uptime: 29 days, 3 hours, 15 mins 
 $$P      d$'     ,    $$P       Packages: 3 (npm), 1526 (dpkg) 
 $$:      $$.   -    ,d$$'       Shell: bash 5.2.37 
 $$;      Y$b._   _,d$P'         Resolution: 1280x800 
 Y$$.    `.`"Y$$$$P"'            Terminal: /dev/pts/1 
 `$$b      "-.__                 CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2696 v4 (44) @ 2.1GHz 
  `Y$$                           GPU: Vendor 1234 Device 1111 
   `Y$$.                         Memory: 20.74 GiB / 31.33 GiB (66%) 
     `$$b.                       Network: Unknown 
       `Y$$b.                    BIOS: SeaBIOS 0.0 (04/01/2014) 
          `"Y$b._
              `"""

Let’s Get Started

1. Building UEFI

1.1 Prerequisites

There is a project on GitHub called quartz64_uefi that has ported UEFI to RK356X platforms, so that is a good place to start. First, clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/jaredmcneill/quartz64_uefi

Looking at the project structure, it already ships a platform, device tree and drivers specifically for the OrangePi 3B, and build.sh includes a build flow for it. So we can try building it directly
OrangePi 3B platform directory in the quartz64_uefi project

for board in ${RKUEFIBOARDS}; do
        case ${board} in
        QUARTZ64)
                build_uefi Pine64 Quartz64
                build_fit Quartz64 rk3566-quartz64-a
                ;;
        SOQUARTZ)
                build_uefi Pine64 SOQuartz
                build_fit SOQuartz rk3566-soquartz-cm4
                ;;
        ROC-RK3566-PC)
                build_uefi Firefly ROC-RK3566-PC
                build_fit ROC-RK3566-PC rk3566-roc-pc
                ;;
        ROC-RK3568-PC)
                build_uefi Firefly ROC-RK3568-PC
                build_fit ROC-RK3568-PC rk3568-firefly-roc-pc
                ;;
# OrangePi 3B Here...
        ORANGEPI3B)
                build_uefi OrangePi OrangePi3B
                build_fit OrangePi3B rk3566-orangepi-3b
                ;;
        PINETAB2)
                build_uefi Pine64 PineTab2
                build_fit PineTab2 rk3566-pinetab2
                ;;
        ZERO-3W)
                build_uefi Radxa Zero-3W
                build_fit Zero-3W rk3566-radxa-zero-3w
                ;;
        ODROID-M1S)
                build_uefi HardKernel Odroid-M1S
                build_fit Odroid-M1S rk3566-hardkernel-odroid-m1s
                ;;
        *)
                echo "Unknown board ${RKUEFIBOARDS}"
                exit 1
                ;;
        esac
done

1.2 Checking the Environment

Check the Git submodule status

git submodule status

If the owner of the current directory differs from the user running Git, Git will complain about dubious ownership. In that case, add it as a trusted directory

git config --global --add safe.directory path/to/quartz64_uefi

Check the toolchain Because I’m building arm64 firmware on an amd64 machine, I need a cross-compilation toolchain here. Let’s pull the dependency list out of the official CI config and install it

cat .github/workflows/build.yml

That config lists everything the official build needs: gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu, iasl, device-tree-compiler, python3-pyelftools and uuid-dev. Install them directly

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu iasl device-tree-compiler python3-pyelftools uuid-dev

Check what edk2-rockchip actually is

git -C ed2k-rockchip rev-parse HEAD
ls edk2-rockchip/.git
git ls-files | grep edk2-rockchip

After running these you’ll find that edk2-rockchip/ and edk2-rockchip-non-osi/rkbin/ are the platform code plus Rockchip’s official vendor components (DDR init firmware, BL31, OP-TEE, and the boot_merger/ddrbin_tool utilities). We need to confirm whether they are submodules or vendored straight into Git:

There is no .git file, and git ls-files shows 234 files tracked directly. So they are vendored into the main repository, and cloning it is all we need.
Only edk2 is a real submodule, so only edk2 needs its own init.

1.3 Initialising the Build Environment

Update and initialise all submodules

git submodule update --init --recursive

--recursive also clones nested submodules, because edk2 itself contains test framework submodules such as cmocka/googletest/subhook

edk2 is a 200MB+ repository, so you’ll want a stable network connection for this step.

1.4 Trying the Build

Start the build with make

make BOARDS=ORANGEPI3B uefi

This usually only takes a few minutes. If it takes far longer, check whether the earlier steps went wrong

Once that finishes, use make to build an image you can flash to an SD card

make BOARDS=ORANGEPI3B sdcard

This requires parted to be installed beforehand, otherwise it errors out

When the build finishes you get an ORANGEPI3B_EFI.img file that you can flash straight to an SD card and try booting.

2. Booting UEFI

2.1 Flashing

Use Win32DiskImager to write ORANGEPI3B_EFI.img to an SD card.

2.2 Booting

After rebooting you’ll see the Orange Pi logo and the tianocore banner. With no boot device inserted, it drops straight into the BIOS.

OrangePi 3B entering the UEFI setup screen after boot

As far as I know, earlier builds only had USB 3.0 working. In the build I compiled here, all four USB-A ports work.

2.3 Flashing an OS

You can use something like UltraISO to write a bootable image to a USB drive and boot straight from it; UEFI will boot into your installation media automatically.

Flashing the UEFI firmware to an SD card with an image tool

That wraps up the whole UEFI build-and-flash process.

Conclusion

I’m not a professional, so please point out any mistakes or omissions. Thanks!

Attachments

ORANGEPI3B_EFI.zip