Sovol's H616 hosts (Zero, SV08, SV08 Max) are near-clones of the BigTreeTech CB1, and their vendor OS images are rebadged BTT CB1 images (Debian 11, kernel 5.16.17-sun50iw9). The differences live entirely in the device tree — and once you know them, stock Armbian (board profile BigTreeTech CB1) runs on the stock eMMC with a tiny user overlay, no custom OS build. The full verified walkthrough for the Zero is in lexfrei/sovol-zero-mainline — OS.md; this gist is the method plus the per-board numbers.
The official images (Sovol wiki → Google Drive) are raw disk images: FAT16 BOOT partition at sector 8192 (byte offset 4194304), ext4 rootfs after it. The DTBs sit on the BOOT partition.
# no root needed — mtools reads the FAT partition straight out of the image