Interesting new RISC-V machines

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danboid
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Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by danboid »

The VisionFive 2 is the first RISC-V based SBC that threatened to compete with the RPi 4 etc in spec and features but in Linux's current "definitely not optimised for the RISC-V" state, the VisionFive ends up performing closer to the RPi3.

I was getting quite excited about the VisionFive 2 SBC because I was the under impression it was going to have a open source GPU driver. It uses a PowerVR GPU and Imagination recently released an open source driver for another one of their GPUs so I suppose there is hope it could happen yet although I'm not banking on it.

Jeff Geerling has got his VisionFive 2 and managed to get his Radeon HD 7470 working on it using a M.2 to PCIe x16 adapter after rebuilding the kernel.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/ ... five-2-sbc

What could prove to be more interesting is the HiFive Pro P550:

https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-pro-p550

"RISC-V is inevitable, and the HiFive Pro P550 development system exemplifies that. In partnership, Intel and SiFive are excited to introduce the highest performance RISC-V development board, which is scheduled to be available Summer 2023. The soul of the machine is the Intel Horse Creek SoC, built on the Intel 4 process, that includes a SiFive Performance™ P550 Core Complex, a quad-core application processor featuring a thirteen-stage, triple-issue, out-of-order pipeline with the RISC-V RV64GBC ISA, and on-board DDR5-5600 and PCIe Gen5. Board features (subject to change) include; 16GB DDR5, 2x PCIe expansion slots, 1/10GbE Networking, USB 3, on-board graphics and a remote management ready interface (OCP DC-SCM). This is a premium software development system ideal for developer desktop machines and rack-based build/test/deploy servers for RISC-V software development. RISC-V has no limits."
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danboid
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by danboid »

It does look like the open source GPU driver is going ahead for the VisionFive 2:

https://forum.rvspace.org/t/img-bxe4-32 ... e-plan/600

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mes ... magination
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Artcfox
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by Artcfox »

That is great news
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danboid
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by danboid »

Yesterday I bit the bullet and ordered a VisionFive 2. It cost me £111 inc. expedited postage from the states for a 8 GB RAM model, which seems like a reasonable price to me compared to equivalent ARM or x86-64 based devices. I should have it before the end of next week.

It will not be as fast as the recentish ARM boards I've already got, mainly because most open source is optimised for ARM and/or x86 but not RISCV yet. What pushed me over the line was that you can now run Haiku on the Vision Five 2 so the massive novelty factor of being able to run my fave non-Linux open source OS on a new arch and the open source mesa graphics driver was enough to reel me in.

https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress ... ve-2/13369
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danboid
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by danboid »

I've printed a case for my VF2 and I've tried a few distros, Arch being the best so far.

I've upgraded it to the latest firmware so I should be able to boot Linux directly off NVME now but I've not been able to boot Arch directly off SSD yet.

I've tested all its hardware as working except Vulkan / OGLES or HW video decoding. I've also yet to try building the open source GPU driver.

No luck building Haiku yet.
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by D3thAdd3r »

That sounds like a sweet box! Still need to find the time to get the X96 going, but the overall ecosystem available now for small, cheap, and powerful devices is really mind boggling
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danboid
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by danboid »

You've got a micro SD card now have you? That is key to unlocking your TV boxs potential.

The VF2 is definitely not ready for primetime or average users yet but its looking very promising and I think this could be my best SBC in a year or so, unless I buy something better yet in the mean time, when the GPU driver and mainline Linux kernel support have matured a bit.

The disappointing aspects of the VF2 are that the USB 3 ports don't provide enough juice to power a mechanical 2.5" USB disk like my TV box and Jetson Nano do, the micro SD card slot doesn't get enough power to use the high speed SD card modes so its limited to 22 MB/s or thereabouts and the nvme slot is only PCIe 2.0 capable yet I've not heard of anyone achieving anything better than about 280 MB/s with an m.2 SSD so far. It should be able to manage more like 400+ MB/s with PCIe 2.0.

I've had it for just over a week now but I've only been able to boot it from the super slow micro SD card. I can access my NVMe SSD under Debian and Arch but I've not had any luck booting directly from the NVMe yet.

https://forum.rvspace.org/t/nvme-boot-u ... -5/2464/16

It is much better documented than pretty much every other (ARM) SBC except maybe the RPis (only because of its massive user base) which is a huge plus and its great to see Starfive actively developing the kernel, its OS and getting their code upstream as best they can. It seems quite well suported already considering how new it all is in all fairness. A lot of the SBCs (and TV boxes) are dumped out with no docs and the public dev community is expected to do all the work. In the case of NVIDIA they get it working, dcument it to an extent but don't expect more than one stable OS release for your board from Nvidia, as they did with the Jetson Nano. Upstreaming their code? Forget about it.
danboids-3D-printed-VF2-case.jpg
danboids-3D-printed-VF2-case.jpg (284.07 KiB) Viewed 2674 times
This is the case I printed:

https://www.printables.com/model/360115 ... ether-case

It's the 2.5mm vented base with a couple of minor mods.
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danboid
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by danboid »

I finally got around to testing the 202306 SF Debian VF2 image last night. Whilst its a shame that we can't upgrade yet without likely breaking the graphics and the unstable rv64 repos are dialup speed most of the time, 202306 is one of the most significant updates to an OS I've ever seen. Most "desktop" Linux type apps like browsers were barely usable before but now Firefox is looking much more usable with some mostly working graphics drivers in place, Youtube seems quite usable under Firefox now.

The most impressive thing is that I was able to install mpv then get the VF2 to do a good job of playing back a 60fps 4K hevc/h265 video, scaling it in realtime to play on a 1080p display. I have only seen mpv work this well on the Jetson Nano before, outside of running mpv on x86/64. Unfortnately 4K playback on a 4K display isn't working yet:

https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2/issues/63

The Jetson Nano can play 4K 60 fps video on a 4K display via mpv but only with nvidias closed GPU driver and on an OS they've stopped supporting. The Nano was barely supported for two years before nvidia left everyone on Ubuntu 18.04.

Earlier in this thread, Michael gave some instructions for configuring VLC. He said you should configure VLC to use `FFmpeg` (which is wrong anyway, the `ffmpeg` command is all lower case) as the decoding program when what he should've wrote is `ffplay`.

I get better NVMe performance running Arch instead of SF Debian 202306

https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2/issues/60

Watch out for this error if you try running any SDL2 programs (eg games and emulators):

https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2/issues/61

The SF minimal Debian desktop image should also include the nautilus (GNOME) file manager at least IMO:

https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2/issues/62

I am currently building Godot 4.1 to see if I can get that run to test out the Vulkan / OGLES support...

Exciting progress!
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danboid
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by danboid »

As reported by Phoronix, RISC-V has now been promoted to an official Debian CPU architecture:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Official-RISC-V
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danboid
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Re: Interesting new RISC-V machines

Post by danboid »

LTT test a milkv 64-core RISCV desktop but the performance, driver support and many other things aren't quite there yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaMxTSm53UU

Let's see where RISCV is in 5 years.
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