Some low hanging fruit to make it eaiser for new users to get started with the VisionFive 2

I started working with my VisionFive 2 board this morning and though that I would take some note where the process for new users can be improved. Overall, I am impressed with the available documentation and community communication.

  1. I first noticed that public-facing documentation is split between two different sites. https://rvspace.org/ and 技术文档 . In the short term, this is rather confusing as a new user needs to explore both places to figure out where different types of information are located. In the long term, this will likely become hard to maintain up-to-date information in different locations.

It might be worthwhile to go though the work of moving everything to a single location and communicating that the location is the Single Point of Truth.

  1. The quick start guide is very good for a product this new. My only concern here is the number of pages of preliminary material before getting to the good stuff. A brand new user doing a ‘quick start’ does not need to be overwhelmed by information about legal revisions, charts, and figures. They want to get their board going.

  2. The third hurdle is the naming and location of the recommended software installation. I hypothesize that StarFive is trying to sort out what development happens internally on their in-house development system and what development happens externally on GitHub.

Several download links point to https://debian.starfivetech.com/ which point to additional links, neither of which worked for me.

Other download links point to starfive-tech · GitHub .

Keeping software links in sync with the latest release becomes complicated very quickly.

  1. Software naming convention. Sometimes the image is called VisionFive 2 Debian Wiki - 202302 Release other places, it is called VisionFive2 Software v2.10.4.
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Greatly increasing monitor/HDMI compatibility, and adding a framebuffer+console that uboot can use would be my favourite.

One location for all documentation is a good idea. I do not know if you found this post, but there is a pinned FAQ/Quicklinks in the VisionFive 2 category, which I found useful:

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I really like the work that StarFive has done so far. I think that I might start writing a weekly status report on the status of the VisionFive ecosystem and highlighting what progress has been made in the previous week.

@mzs thanks, that is a great link.

I expect that tempering expectations is going to be a big part of StarFives work for the next several months. We are all used to the current state of Raspberry PI and tend to forget about what a mess the software was for the first couple of years.

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I read the article in question and I have to say it’s not that bad. I agree on many things and I must say that this community of enthusiasts and developers is very well organized compared to other more famous projects.

the vision2 is the first board with an attractive price to get to know riscv but this does not mean being more performing than the raspberry pi 4.

I think that whoever buys the vision2 is a person who already knows the SBC systems and is ready to waste time to understand when something is wrong and it is necessary to do research on the forum and website.

everything can be improved but I have to congratulate the staff who have already released three working images and are very active on this forum. also the doc section of the site is now written well and I hope soon to be able to see other new features implemented such as boot from ssd and general optimization.

I hope soon that someone from canonical who maybe received the vision2 can release the first official ubuntu release, but it’s not a priority

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Me too!

I suspect Ubuntu also need the Firmware and SBI to mature a bit more, otherwise they are releasing against a moving target, which is difficult.

Ubuntu needs Debian to support it before they can add their modifications (Ubuntu is Debian under the hood).

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@mzs Caonical dont need to wait for mainline support, creating their own Debian (apt) based distros, with a kernel they patch themselves when necessary, is essentially their main business.
But they are good open-source players; so this work will come into Debian upstream immediately.