I installed the above at the weekend. Up to this moment, I did not have to touch the dip switches on the board.
The board will now boot, with one of the dip switches on or off, I cannot remember which one. This was NOT the case when I originally purchased the board in January, flashed firmware and installed the 69 Debian image.
Also I had Debian keyring authentication problems, but changed /etc/apt/sources.list to point to - deb Index of /debian-ports unstable main contrib non-free.
Now, after an apt full-upgrade, the board will not boot anymore.
Am I being too ambitious here or am I missing a firmware upgrade that matches the 202302 image?
The images provided by StarFive are based on a specific snapshot versions repos, but with some specific components replaced or reconfigured to support the new hardware.
They are not intended to be upgraded. And forcing a upgrade will break the graphics subsystem and more. The only advice I can give is to roll back to the '69 or 202302 images.
Thanks for the prompt reply.
It would be nice to have a caveat placed on the 202302 information page stating this fact.
Also, why do I suddenly have to manipulate the dip switches to get the board to boot now?
I did not have to do this before.
The onboard 16MiB QSPI flash probably contains old SPL (u-boot-spl.bin.normal.out), and old OpenSBI + U-Boot (visionfive2_fw_payload.img) bootloaders.
The SD card (or EMMc) now contains version v2.10.4 of the SPL and OpenSBI + U-Boot on partition 1 and partition 2 respectively.
So if you leave the switches in the default factory position (1bit QSPI NOR FLASH) the boot process will attempt to use the old and now out of date bootloaders which will probably not work with any current or future releases (without SPL and U-Boot in Flash being updated beforehand), because of constant changes to improve which will soon add the ability to boot from NVMe (using the onboard FLASH). But that will require that the bootloaders in the FLASH be upgraded to, at a guess, VF2_v2.11.5 (What’s new: Support PCIe in U-Boot) or possibly a later version of the bootloaders, no official announcement has been made about NVMe yet, but the release note for 202302 do say that it should be a usable feature in the next release. One fast way to break a working system is to try to make changes without fully understanding the full ramifications (and howto fully undo your changes no matter what goes wrong because of your changes). The safest and easiest option is to wait on the next official release, which will contain exact instructions of the exact required changes.
I have to say when it comes to documentation, StarFive have been fantastic.
I particularly like the JH7110 Upstream Plan, basically wait until kernel 6.4 or later if you want to do things like “apt full-upgrade”.