Starfive Visionfive 2 SBC Update

Introduction

I previously blogged on the Starfive Visionfive 2 RISC-V base Single Board Computer (SBC) here. This computer is a great introduction to working with and programming RISC-V computers. It is similar to a Raspberry Pi in functionality, it runs Debian Linux and seems to work reasonably well. Last week Starfive released the June release of their Debian Linux version which fixed a number of bugs and added some welcome new programs.

The June Debian Release

This release fixes a number of bugs such as the screen color problems. The installation process is the same as the last release, which is more than burning and SD-card image, such as:

• The first thing you need to do is connect to the Internet. If you are hardwired, you are good to go, but if you are Wifi, as I am, then you need to go into Settings, select the network and enter the password.
• Next you need to resize the file system as this isn’t done automatically. Otherwise you have very limited disk space and installing pretty much anything will fail.
• There is no browser installed, so the best way to get running is to use ssh, so you can copy/paste commands from the Getting Started Guide. I used scp to copy the install script to the SBC for the next step.
• The release image is extremely minimal; they provide a shell script that adds compatible RISC-V versions of Firefox, Chrome, VLC and LibreOffice. However this script took six hours to run.
• You can’t run apt upgrade as it wipes out the special video drivers and HDMI won’t work afterwards.

Once all this is done it works quite well. Some notes:

• There are now separate SD-card, Flash memory and SSD versions making it easier to get started with SD-card alternatives.
• It includes Chrome, which I like.
• The install script adds quite a few programs that aren’t mentioned such as GCC.
• No simple GUI based text editor is installed, so I installed gedit with apt install gedit. There are others available, but my needs are currently simple.

The documentation mentions that some programs now use GPU acceleration, though I don’t really notice it. Performance still lags behind a Raspberry Pi 4, but I feel it is better than the Raspberry Pi 3.

Running Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice Writer and VLC.

Summary

It’s been a bit of a wait since the March, 2023 release, but this does appear to be a good upgrade. If the base image included Firefox or Chromium and it resized the file system on first boot, it would be a big time saver. That being said, once I had the basics installed, the system seems to work fairly well and I feel I can get work done.

Although there aren’t nearly as many RISC-V packages available as ARM ones, I’m finding many things I try to install with apt install are working. But it will still be awhile before reaching the same level as a Raspberry Pi.

The RISC-V world is getting exciting with all sorts of new processors and computers. Most FPGAs have freely available RISC-V cores, there are lots of microcontrollers, SBCs like the VisionFive 2 coming on the market and now newer RISC-V computers with many cores for server applications. The VisionFive 2 board is a great inexpensive way to play with RISC-V, but you are still at the bleeding edge and some patience and Linux expertise is required.