The Future Of RISC-V And The VisionFive 2 Single Board Laptop

We’ve been following the open, royalty-free RISC-V ISA for some time. At first we learn the specs, after which we noticed RISC-V cores in microcontrollers, however now there’s a brand new board that gives sufficient processing energy at a low sufficient worth level to actually be attention-grabbing in a single board laptop. The VisionFive 2 ran a profitable Kickstarter again in September 2022, and I’ve lastly acquired a unit with 8 GB of ram. And it really works! The JH7110 gained’t outperform a contemporary desktop, or perhaps a Raspberry Pi 4, nevertheless it’s adequate to run a desktop atmosphere, browse the net, and take a look at software program.

And that’s kind of an enormous deal, as a result of the RISC-V structure is beginning to present up in plenty of locations. The problem has been getting actual {hardware} that’s highly effective sufficient to run Linux and compile software program on, that doesn’t price an arm and a leg. If ARM is an alternate structure, then RISC-V remains to be an experimental one, and that is a matter when making an attempt to make use of the VF2. That’s a theme we’ll repeat just a few occasions, however the factor to recollect right here is that getting extra units within the wild is step one to fixing issues.

The {Hardware}

So what do you get? The VF2 is available in three flavors, with two, 4, and eight gigabytes of RAM. The boards are in any other case similar, and the star of the present is the JH7110, a 64-bit quad-core RISC-V SoC. Constructed-in to that CPU is the Creativeness BXE-4-32 GPU. There’s a USB-C port, often used for powering the board, 4 USB 3.0 ports sharing a single PCIe 2.0 lane, and twin Gigabit Ethernet ports. The board has solely a single HDMI 2.0 port, however is able to working twin shows through the use of a MIPI DSI port as nicely.

There are additionally some neat Raspberry Pi compatibility options. The board has a 40-pin GPIO header, principally suitable with the Raspberry Pi pinout, and even has the four-pin Energy over Ethernet header within the right place for utilizing the Pi PoE HATs. That works very properly, with the one lacking aspect being the fan management on the HAT.

There’s MIPI enter, too. That ought to be suitable with one thing just like the Raspberry Pi cameras, although I don’t have on one hand to check. There’s an SD card slot, an eMMC socket, and a really welcome M.2 NVMe slot on the underside of the gadget. Thus far, booting off the NVMe nonetheless requires a boot partition on the SD card, however nonetheless ends in all of the velocity enhance the one devoted PCIe 2.0 lane is price. Direct boot from NVMe is on the roadmap, however not but applied.

OS Assist

The {hardware} within reason spectacular, however the utility hinges on the OS and software program help. There’s a Debian picture that’s seeing common updates, with points regularly getting mounted. What we actually care about is upstream standing, and that course of has began. There’s hope for a minimally booting system with kernel 6.3, although there are fairly just a few drivers to upstream earlier than the system is totally usable with the vanilla kernel.

And a kind of drivers we’ve got to say is the GPU. The {hardware} is called BXE-4-32 GPU, a GPU core from Creativeness Applied sciences, and successor to the PowerVR structure. Creativeness is making a play for getting its designs constructed into RISC-V chips, and as a part of that, has launched open supply drivers for its trendy merchandise. There’s an ongoing effort to upstream these drivers, and a few enablement code has already landed in Mesa.

There’s additionally the broader concern of RISC-V help. A lot of the trendy distros construct RISC-V packages, nevertheless it’s not unusual to search out issues or failing packages on this much less well-liked structure. For instance, I wished to benchmark the VF2 board utilizing the Phoronix Check Suite. That’s obtainable as a noarch package deal, however has a number of dependencies, like php-cli. That is dependent upon php8.2, and that package deal at the moment fails to construct on RISC-V on Debian. There’s a patch obtainable to repair the difficulty, so I used to be in a position to rebuild the .deb on the VF2 and get issues working.

So About These Benchmarks

It’s at all times enjoyable to benchmark shiny new {hardware}. So think about my disappointment when practically each CPU take a look at I attempted both failed to put in, or didn’t run. I believe that is additionally the novelty of the RISC-V platform, as lots of the PTS checks simply haven’t been constructed for the platform but.

For people who did run, it’s not nice. Check out my outcomes. I believe the efficiency could enhance because the software program turns into extra mature, nevertheless it’s at the moment manner behind a Raspberry Pi 4. Jeff Geerling has protection of this board, too, and located that the VF2 is at the moment performing within the ballpark of a Pi B 3.

There are some necessary exceptions to these observations. First, system checks that rely closely on drive entry present a big benefit for the VF2. The Pi was booted off a NVMe drive by way of a USB3 adapter, however the native NVMe efficiency remains to be considerably higher.

After which these two Ethernet ports are notably attention-grabbing. May this factor be helpful as a excessive efficiency router? I checked out it’s efficiency pushing packets with the Debian set up, and it’s able to nearly wire speeds. I ran an iperf3 velocity take a look at via the gadget doing a easy NAT, just like a typical router set up, and it managed to common 755 Mbits per second. Utilizing the bidirectional choice, the take a look at managed simply over 600 Mbits per second in each instructions. Respectable for something however a full Gigabit Web connection. There was work finished on convey OpenWRT to the platform, and which will include higher throughput, however the newest OpenWRT improvement department fails in addition on my gadget.

What’s it good for?

OK, we’ve coated a number of floor. So what do the brass tacks appear like right here? The VisionFive 2 has some potential. The twin Gigabit ports and coming OpenWRT help make the $100 gadget tempting as a router, and PoE help doesn’t damage. The NVMe drive is one other leg up, and there might be a case made for the VF2 as community storage gadget.

It’s not highly effective sufficient to be a desktop alternative gadget, and the shortage of twin HDMI ports don’t assist any. The varied distros don’t actually have tier-one help for RISC-V but, both. And oddly, that could be this board’s largest promoting level. Do you do any maintainer or programming work? Have you ever checked your code on a RISC-V processor but? That’s the actual alternative right here. It’s an reasonably priced platform to test-run RISC-V help.

That course of is ongoing, for builders all over the place. And that’s one of many causes that efficiency is a bit disappointing. Many purposes that want the efficiency have operate multiversioning, a method that permits for platform particular code that may actually enhance efficiency. If a platform doesn’t have a tailor-made implementation, this system drops again to the slower default code. And given the relative newness of the RISC-V platform, it’s not shocking that efficiency isn’t in high form but.

However 2023 would possibly simply be the 12 months of the RISC-V SBC. The VisionFive 2 is out there, and the parents at Pine64 are planning a brand new board primarily based on the identical JH7110 CPU. There’s the upcoming HiFive Professional board, or the Ventana Veyron CPU. So perhaps it’s time to dive in, and provides RISC-V a spin.