Issues with the openSUSE image and how to fix most of them

OpenSUSE
1

Seeing that many drivers for the JH7110 are now included in mainline Linux, I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed on my board. Unfortunately, there are some severe issues with the current image:

  1. It boots up with 8 GiB of memory visible to the kernel – no matter how much memory your board has. If you have less than 8 GiB, segmentation faults will bite you.
  2. Lots of hardware that should work with the supplied kernel does not. For example, PCIe, USB, thermal sensors, SPI, etc…
  3. It feels slow, in particular when I/O on the SD card is involved.
  4. It does not properly shutdown. Instead, in most cases, the board freezes on shutdown and the file systems need a check on next boot.

For most of these issues I found workarounds and now I have a nicely working rolling-release distro with mainline Linux 6.6 running:

bevan@starfive:~> neofetch --color_blocks
                                     ......            bevan@starfive 
     .,cdxxxoc,.               .:kKMMMNWMMMNk:.        -------------- 
    cKMMN0OOOKWMMXo. A        ;0MWk:'      ':OMMk.     OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed riscv64 
  ;WMK;'       'lKMMNM,     :NMK'             'OMW;    Host: StarFive VisionFive 2 v1.3B 
 cMW;             WMMMN   ,XMK'                 oMM.   Kernel: 6.6.0-rc4-60-default 
.MMc             ''^*~l. xMN:                    KM0   Uptime: 8 hours, 22 mins 
'MM.                   .NMO                      oMM   Packages: 2244 (rpm) 
.MM,                 .kMMl                       xMN   Shell: bash 5.2.15 
 KM0               .kMM0' .dl>~,.               .WMd   Terminal: /dev/pts/2 
 'XM0.           ,OMMK'    OMMM7'              .XMK    CPU: (4) @ 1.500GHz 
   *WMO:.    .;xNMMk'       NNNMKl.          .xWMx     Memory: 3665MiB / 3896MiB 
     ^ONMMNXMMMKx;          V  'xNMWKkxllox0NMWk'
         '''''                    ':dOOXXKOxl'

The thing one probably should not expect is HDMI output. Although I have not tested it, the JH7110 Upstream Plan shows it as “Under review”. Also, analog audio out will only come with Linux 6.7.

I wrote about all the details at https://0xstubs.org/opensuse-tumbleweed-on-the-starfive-visionfive-2/.

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