Anyone using VF2 as a server?

I’m interested in using a VF2 as a NAS due to the usb3.0

Does anyone have experience with using the VF2 in this way? from what i can tell, OMV would work and the speeds ive seen are great compared to other pi alternatives. Any advice or insight before I pull the trigger?

I guess also as a follow up, do we think this platform is stable enough for this type of implementation?

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Well I currently dont just because how noisy and annoying xu4 fan is (can I just reconnect it to 3.3v gpio or it will create interference/overload?)
But I tested with USB3.0 SATA adapter and it giving me stable full disk speed from Seagate 8TB ST8000DM004 without problems. Of course, that hdd requires separate 12v power included with adapter.
Hackish NAS? Yes. And you can even play games on it.

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Currently in the process of setting up a startum1 time server using an adafruit gps hat with visionfive2.
we’re still not sure which os to use as the debian releases by starfive are based on snapshots and a pain to keep up to date…
currently experimenting with a custom armbian build based on debian sid.

One slight issue for server use we encountered: when loading both 1G NICs with traffic the combined throughput never exceeds about 1400Mbit/s (tested with iperf). I think that is because of the underlying bus connecting them to the cpu but it might also be a driver inefficiency.

@strlcat According to the schematics this 3.3v line can supply up to 2A and is used for the sdcard, emmc, chip peripherals and csi+dsi+gpio connectors. i think drawing up to 0.5A should be no issue, especially without any display on the dsi connector.

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If you can get OMV working, please do post a tutorial! Thanks

The question was asked on the Open Media Vault forum:

And that points to generic instructions here:

But if you look inside the latest package repository used above: http://packages.openmediavault.org/public/dists/shaitan/main/
There are no binary packages for risc-v (only for amd64, arm64, armel, armhf and i386), so everything would need to be built from source code.

Two other useful links might be:
https://github.com/openmediavault/
https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/

But it might be best if you hit a problem, to ask in the place where there is the highest concentration of knowledge about Open Media Vault which would definitely be the OMV forum.

@valium Would love to know the details of your stratum 1 time server. How do you get PPS recognised? What tweaks to use the serial port?

If compilation fails, perhaps Box64 might help? Not sure when it’s going to be released for RISC-V, but the author has already shown playing x86 games on the VisionFive 2. But you might get a big impact on performance.

They do have the original source code, with Debian patches available.
http://packages.openmediavault.org/public/pool/

Looking at the packages I can not see anything obvious that would be architecture specific, but with a large enough number of prerequisites there is usually something with a few lines of assembly in it for acceleration.

@philrandal I’ve just started a thread about device tree overlays which are needed for pps.
planning a how-to post on the whole project later on :slight_smile:

the serial port is a bit special cause it is also used via sbi and the riscv-sbi-hvc kernel driver. to just use it as a serial port for gps we disabled logins and kernel messages on ttyS0 and hvc0. (if hvc0 is in use setting the baudrate on ttyS0 crashes the kernel…)

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Looking forward to your full howto. You encountered the same problems that I did when I started investigating the possibility of using a Uputronics GPS hat on the visionfive2.