First Impressions of the VisionFive 2 | Hacker News Reader

First Impressions of the VisionFive 2

earth.li

50 pointsstevefolta21 comments

The main problems Ive had with it so far. Is the graphics. Kernel is fine but the userspace was difficult to get working. A Chinese user on the forums had figured it out. You need the proprietary Vulkan + GLES libraries from IMG and the fork of mesa to get EGL, etc. Which doesn't work with libglvnd so some packages won't install because they explicitly depend on libglvnd.

And the kernel has device mapper disabled so I couldn't use kpartx to mount a drive image with partitions. Also means dm-crypt or LVM2 won't either.

But these kinda kinks can be worked out I think so I hope we get a good out of the box experience in a few months.

>no heatsink/fan

CPU can take some quite industrial range (125C? I know I've seen a number somewhere...), and will throttle starting at 85C. In practice, it will get to 75C in long compiling sessions. Thus, it doesn't really need a heatsink.

However, you might want to install a m.2 nvme, in which case you'll definitely want that heatsink as you'll have more heat. I went with XU4Q's (from ODROID), which is a passive solution, a tall heatsink. It fits in place w/o issue and doesn't disturb m.2. CPU tops out at around 57C now.

I notice that, in the pictures, the reviewer did not install the 4x spacers that shipped with the board. This board will not sit evenly on a desk, as the m.2 slot protrudes; it might interfer with cooling. That'd explain 90C where I got 75C.

We have one person here at Red Hat who managed to brick theirs. We're not sure of the exact cause but heat might have been an issue. Looking at the article I was quite worried that the author isn't using a heatsink (yet)!

If they still have the board, try booting with boot switches set to UART.

An XMODEM 'CCCCC' should show up in the serial port at 115200 8N1.

If that's the case, bootloader in SPI got corrupted. There's a rescue tool for this UART boot. It can fix that.

They don't ship with spacers?

Mine (from waveshare) did.

My friend recently bought Vision Five 2, and we've tested its performance, comparing to Vision Five 1. Here are the results: https://twitter.com/ClickHouseDB/status/1619767689861550081

The outcomes: - it shows several times better results, but we suspect that the previous result was misconfigured; - the performance is still way behind Raspberry Pi, Rock Pi and other AArch64 machines.

We are building for RISC-V with cross-compilation, details here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/31398

Supposedly this thing comes with the Imagination Technologies BXE-4-32 GPU. Anyone know if this is supported out of the box by Linux/Mesa or if it's a black box? I've been burned by evil secretive GPUs in SBCs before.

The article discusses this and links to this page which was news to me: https://developer.imaginationtech.com/open-source-gpu-driver...

There is a libre Vulkan driver for recent PowerVR GPUs in mesa, but it isn't up to Vulkan 1.0 yet. Once it is usable, the mesa zink driver will provide OpenGL support via Vulkan. Debian doesn't compile the driver yet either.

https://mesamatrix.net/

Are they supposed to be shipping the dual GbE yet?

Because I ordered it in October, got only a paypal receipt with a smartfire.cn email and nothing else. Sent them an email early this month to have a status update, and no reply.

I just wonder if I got "scammed", with no way whatsoever to check my order status. I'll give it a few more days and contact Paypal for a refund. Can't say I'm pleased with the customer service.

Mine came eventually, they did estimate February originally, so maybe take a look at that. They required backers to email and confirm their addresses too, so make sure that didn't get filtered as spam.

There's a thread in rvspace for delivery tracking, you might want to look there.

People who participated in the kickstarter have only recently started to receive their boards.

Mine came yesterday...

I ordered about the same time and received it a week ago. Do you have a backer number? As the other reply says, join rvspace.org - the developers are pretty responsive.

I have a stick on heatsink, tiny fan plugged into the vf2 fan header (2 wires don't think it's controlled in anyway) and a 3D printed case[0].

I don't know where the temp sensor is on the board but it read 54 (about 24 above ambient), now it sits at about 32 (ambient +12). I could only get the minimal image69 running so not much practical use at the minute.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/104dayd/i_designed_a...

>I don't know where the temp sensor is on the board but it read 54 (about 24 above ambient)

The temperature sensor resides within the JH7110 SoC.

The https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/ repository is slower than cold snot on a doorknob. Unfortunately, trying https://deb.debian.org/debian-ports/ instead causes problems.

The snapshot.d.o URL is the wrong one to use, they should not be using that.

What problems does the deb.d.o URL have?

If the issue is the OpenPGP key expired, then you need to update the ports keyring package to the new version:

https://deb.debian.org/debian-ports/pool/main/d/debian-ports...

Why is this such a ridiculously bad page on mobile?

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