VisionFive 2 RISC-V

[ChriChri]

@iliketurtles

I feel like a VisionFive 2, with open source drivers, firmware and software would be good enough for me.

I immediately had to think about the MNT Reform and their research in Risc-V.

Maybe they would be willing to evaluate putting an existing SOC like the StarFive StarFive JH7110 onto a CPU board for the MNT Reform to offer an alternative to the pricy MNT RKX7 FPGA Module.

Note

[ChriChri]

minute (@mntmn@mastodon.social)

I guess someone would need to organize the customers (and the money) to make it possible.

[carlosgonz]

@irvinewade

Does @carlosgonz own the necessary Intel discrete GPU hardware in order to cite personal experience?

I bought an A770 graphics card a month ago to use it in a machine with coreboot, this machine has ME disabled, and it is also pcie 3.0(pcie version not matter much), the problem is that i can’t get the A770 card to work, trying to find out why not working, i saw a video of an intel engineer saying that it requires ME enabled to work properly, since then i stopped get work my A770. I wanted the Intel card A770 card because it is AV1 encoder and free software driver, plus powerful gpu.
My computer baseboard it is: https://www.phoronix.com/news/ASRock-B75-Coreboot

[dcz]

Can you show the video in question? I remember there was some initial misunderstanding about that in the beginning.

[irvinewade]

@carlosgonz

this machine has ME disabled

Well I guess the test then is … if you don’t disable the ME (HAP bit) then does the graphics card suddenly start working? But of course I understand you might not want to do that test.

Given that you have paid actual money to buy an actual Intel product … and it isn’t working … maybe you should ask Intel.

[iliketurtles]

https://doc-en.rvspace.org/JH7110/TRM/

JH7110 Preliminary Technical Reference Manual including memory map

[carlosgonz]

@irvinewade

if you don’t disable the ME (HAP bit) then does the graphics card suddenly start working? But of course I understand you might not want to do that test.

Well i do not want enable ME. I still have some troubleshooting to test like linux 6.3 and Mesa 23, so i guess that the next evil-opensource-ubuntu version i will use it to testing again.

[carlosgonz]

@dcz

Can you show the video in question?

Yes i will when i found the video.

[nicole.faerber]

@iliketurtles

JH7110 Preliminary Technical Reference Manual including memory map

Right, but still very very incomplete. But I am confident they will complete this. Writing such documentation is very work intense…

Cheers
nicole

[Skalman]

This was published today:

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

[narezina]

I ordered one few days ago, idea is to use it as a low performance workstation. Worst case, it’ll end up as a NAS or home server of some kind. It should arrive in about a month, I hope, so I’ll report my impressions then.

[carlosgonz]

New powerfull+ SOC-SOM RISC-V 14nm 2.0GX4
https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a/

Will this Risc-V SOM compat with MNT Reform?

I have one Startfive 2 risc-v and it work ugly ATM, it promises to work fancy next Debian version for.

[carlosgonz]

@nicole.faerber

The real advantage the older Intel machines have is that they do not have this rotten ME as part of the SOC, this is really the worst and it gets even worse with current Intel SOCs where in some the ME is even necessary to run to be able to do S3 (aka suspend to RAM). So in these you can not even use the HAP bit anymore to disable the ME at runtime or else you loose S3. Pretty bad.

System76 found a hack to disable ME by HAP and keeping S3 working in newer Intel SoCs 11,12,13
https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/73297