14 KiB
+++ draft = false date = 2023-02-22T12:36:00+05:30 slug = "visionfive-2-initial-review.md" title = "Hands on and initial review of the VisionFive 2" description = "So RISC-V is a thing, huh." tags = [ "riscv" ] +++
Since a long time, RISC-V was in my news feed. I have no idea about RISC-V other than that it is an open source ISA (not implementation). That made me curious and I wanted to get something RISC-y to understand the hype first-hand.
In August of 2022, I came across the Kickstarter announcement from StarFive (here) about the VisionFive 2. Following hardware features peaked my interest the most:
- Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports (some Super early bird models have 1x 1000M and 1x 100M ports)
- Presence of QSPI flash for
u-boot - The SBC was available with 8 GB of RAM (that is the minimum for me)
The VisionFive 2 also has one M.2 slot for an NVMe (2280) drive, but it doesn't interest me as much. Particularly because it only has the bandwidth of 1x PCIe 2.0 lane. Also because I can not afford a "good" NVMe drive at the moment.
I don't want to put in a cheap NVMe drive because the cheap ones usually omit DRAM. That isn't a problem on a moderately fast computer. But on a computer whose CPU (SiFive U74) [allegedly] performs similarly to an ARM A55 core, said latency hit is more noticeable.
{{< notice info >}} On the note of NVMe, the one thing missing from the hardware perspective is the screw to hold the NVMe drive itself. {{</ notice >}}
Initial software setup
For now, one is expected to form their opinions on hardware performance based on the Debian image provided the vendor.
Before you flash the image provided by the vendor, the board firmware needs to be updated. Please do that first.
Updating firmware
The firmware can be easily updated by following these steps:
- Download 3 assets from VisionFive 2's
latest SDK release:
sdcard.img,u-boot-spl.bin.normal.out,visionfive2_fw_payload.img sudo dd if=sdcard.img conv=sync status=progress bs=1M of=/dev/<YOUR_DEV_HERE>mkdir temp-dirsudo mount /dev/<YOUR_DEV_HERE>4 temp-dirsudo cp u-boot-spl.bin.normal.out visionfive2_fw_payload.img temp-dir/root/sudo umount /dev/<YOUR_DEV_HERE>4- Eject the SD Card from your computer, insert it in VisionFive 2 and power it up. The green LED should start blinking.
- Plug the network cable on the Ethernet port that is next to the HDMI port.
ssh root@<IP_ADDRESS>(passwd:starfive)- Run the command
cat /proc/mtdand you should have the following output:
dev: size erasesize name
mtd0: 00020000 00001000 "spl"
mtd1: 00300000 00001000 "uboot"
mtd2: 00100000 00001000 "data"
- If the partition information is correct, update the
splandubootfirmware using the following commands:
flashcp -v u-boot-spl.bin.normal.out /dev/mtd0
flashcp -v visionfive2_fw_payload.img /dev/mtd1
Done! Now systemctl poweroff and flash the vendor's Debian image to your SD
card and boot it up.
Setup with vendor's image
Although the SD Card image provided by the vendor worked fine for me, people have reported two major things missing from their kernel. The modules for BTRFS are not built and IPv6 isn't supported either. We will compile the kernel soon, but there are other problems with the image that need to be tackled first.
Manually expand the root partition
Unlike most images available for the Raspberry Pi, this image does not
automatically expand the root partition. So first, resize your / partition
using parted:
root@starfive:~# parted /dev/mmcblk1
GNU Parted 3.5
Using /dev/mmcblk1
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) resizepart 3 100%
Warning: Partition /dev/mmcblk1p3 is being used. Are you sure you want to
continue?
Yes/No? Y
(parted) q
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.
Resize the filesystem using resize2fs:
root@starfive:~# resize2fs /dev/mmcblk1p3
resize2fs 1.46.5 (30-Dec-2021)
Filesystem at /d[ 192.744328] EXT4-fs (mmcblk1p3): resizing filesystem from 1280507 to
31186944 blocks
ev/mmcblk1p3 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 15
[ 196.934822] EXT4-fs (mmcblk1p3): resized filesystem to 31186944
The filesystem on /dev/mmcblk1p3 is now 31186944 (4k) blocks long.
Verify the change using the 'df' command. Best reboot now to prevent any soft-errors.
Update Debian keyring
To run apt update without any errors, the Debian keyring needs to be updated.
This can be easily remedied by manually downloading the .deb file for the
Debian keyring package from here (don't worry, it is architecture agnostic).
Choose your nearest mirror and download it. Then, like any other package, do a
dpkg -i debian-ports-archive-keyring*.deb.
Now, you can apt update flawlessly 😉
OPTIONAL: Update APT sources
Please note that there is a reason why the APT sources point to a snapshot. That is because it is a "known good" state of the packages. I am not accountable if your system breaks. I am not a sysadmin.
But this is what I have done to make sure that I stay up-to-date with any developments in the ecosystem.
root@starfive:~# cat <<EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports sid main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports unreleased main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian sid main
EOF
root@starfive:~# apt update
MISC
Better do some housekeeping now...
root@starfive:~# passwd # use a strong password
root@starfive:~# userdel -r user
root@starfive:~# useradd -m -G <GROUPS> -s /bin/bash <USER_NAME>
root@starfive:~# visudo # I enabled 'NOPASSWD' for my user
Software status of the VisionFive 2
Other than the minor inconvenience of updating the board firmware, setting up the vendor's Debian image, everything else seems to mostly work for me.
As new as this SBC is, there already are 5 total offerings for compatible images.
- The vendor provided Debian Sid image
- An "experimental" Debian Sid image
- An Arch Linux image
- Build your own Debian images
- A community image of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
The OpenSUSE image, at the time of writing this, seems to be using the latest Linux kernel that is available (6.2-rc8) and adding StarFive's patches that are for the VisionFive 2. Every other image listed above is using the StarFive 5.15.0 kernel.
I have tested images #1, #2 and #3 and I can confirm that the following things are working as I expected:
- The hardware reset switch works
- The GPIO pins work1 (along with UART)
- Both of the Gigabit Ethernet ports on my board work at the max speed2
- All 4 of the front USB 3.0 ports work (didn’t test speed)
- HDMI port works3
{{< notice info >}}
No offence, but I won't be trying out the OpenSUSE image anytime soon. I
despise PascalCase in a package manager of all things. Firefox is called
MozillaFirefox. WHY?!
{{</ notice >}}
I am daily driving cwt's Arch Linux image. The kernel in this image is the vendor's 5.15.0 Linux kernel. This kernel was compiled to enable the support for IPv6 and BTRFS.
The only modification that I had to perform was to add the following line to
the /etc/pacman.conf file:
IgnorePkg = linux-api-headers
I had to do this because the Linux kernel installed is the vendor's 5.15.0
kernel and the version of the linux-api-headers package is 6.1.9.
{{< notice warning >}} This image has an issue with rebooting. When you try to reboot, the board just shuts down. Though, I am looking into fixing this issue. {{</ notice >}}
People on the RVSpace forum reported that the XU4 fan by Hardkernel fits on their board (buy here). So I ordered one. The fan header on the fan and on the board are incompatible. So I removed the connector from the fan and soldered the wires to the jumper wires and inserted it into my GPIO pins. It works now 😄
With the fan on, and compiling the StarFive's Linux tree for the VisionFive 2
using make all -j4, I never saw the temps go above 42 C. This is quite an
achievement because I am in India (it's very hot here) and in a room that is
without an AC.
The compilation of StarFive's VisionFive 2 Linux kernel tree using the following command completed in 2 hours and 15 minutes. That's really quick for such a machine!
make clean
make mrproper
make starfive_visionfive2_defconfig
ARCH=riscv CFLAGS="-march=rv64imafdc_zicsr_zba_zbb -mcpu=sifive-u74 -mtune=sifive-7-series -O2 -pipe" make all -j4
{{< notice warning >}}
You will need to patch the file arch/riscv/Makefile to compile the kernel
successfully. Here is the patch.
{{</ notice >}}
My thoughts so far
Since the RISC-V ISA is pretty new, there are still some packages that have not been ported yet. As a Neovim user, the biggest hit I received was when I noticed that RISC-V support from upstream LuaJIT is missing. Though, that is being worked on.
The Arch Linux maintainer felixonmars--who is
also porting a lot of packages to RISC-V--has made the Neovim package depend on
lua51 instead of luajit (relevant git commit).
Neovim wouldn't even install on Debian due to the missing dependency of LuaJIT,
but on Arch Linux, I can at least install and use Neovim, albeit without the
traditional Lua support.
I have installed the packages that I have listed below. I haven't tested all of them, but of what I did test, they work as I expect them to do on my Raspbery Pi or on my x86 computer.
android-tools arch-install-scripts aria2 bandwhich base base-devel bat btop cargo-audit cargo-auditable cargo-bloat cargo-depgraph cargo-outdated cargo-spellcheck cargo-watch choose chrony cifs-utils dhcpcd dog dua-cli dust exa fd figlet firewalld gcc git git-lfs groff hd-idle hdparm htop iotop iperf iperf3 linux-firmware lsb-release lsof man-db man-pages mkinitcpio mlocate namcap nano neofetch neovim networkmanager nfs-utils nload nvme-cli opendoas openssh parted paru ripgrep rsync rustup skim smartmontools sudo tealdeer tmux tre tree unrar unzip usbutils wget which wireguard-tools wireless-regdb wol xmlto yt-dlp zsh zsh-autosuggestions zsh-completions zsh-syntax-highlighting
{{< notice note >}} My current workflow does not involve making use of the iGPU in any capacity whatsoever. Hence I will not make any personal comments on it yet. But, people have reported some issues with the display output when the SBC is connected to a 2160p monitor. On the first day, when I couldn't find my UART cable, I had to rely on the display output of the board. So I connected the HDMI port to my 2160p monitor, and, for what it is worth, it at least showed me the boot logs. Though, I did see a black screen instead of the login manager. I haven't done any further testing in this area since. {{< /notice >}}
The state of hardware on the SBC seems good enough for my use: as a development machine and to build software for RISC-V.
StarFive is upstreaming software components. The only thing StarFive is not upstreaming is the GPU drivers. That commitment is the responsibility of Imagination, as per their post.
As of now, I have no gripes as the vendor is not withholding any patches; of what is available, works, the vendor is making an effort to upstream as much as they can.
To repeat myself for the nth time, of what packages are available, they work as one might expect from a PC/laptop. Having such a low cost device with minor issues, like the display output not working as intended at 2160p resolution, (in the context of a developer/porting machine) is a STEAL!
I am very happy with it and I will be using this to learn Linux kernel development (using 🦀) and help port more ARM64/AMD64 software to it. Let me know if you want Rocky Linux on this! 😉
-
I haven't tested all the pins. I used pins 4, 6, 8, 10, and 14. These work without any issue so I assume all 40 pins work as intended. ↩︎
-
You can get 948-ish MBit/s of throughput from each port, which lines up with real world performance of other Gigabit NICs. But, sending traffic in from one port and receiving it from another port is limited to 500-ish MBit/s of throughput due to the way the PHYs are wired ("multiplexed"). ↩︎
-
I don't have a use for display out (on the VF2). I only plugged it in and booted the SBC up. For what it is worth, the boot logs show up when connected to my 2160p monitor. No further graphics testing was performed, since that is not my primary aim with this SBC. ↩︎