Now that I see an increase in the activity on the StarFive forums (and also because my board is arriving soon!), I need to know what is the upstream status of the forked software. Looking at StarFive Tech’s GitHub repository, three of the most important pieces of software that I care about (in the order listed) are:
So what is the upstream status of these software (most importantly u-boot)?
I’ve seen a link in the pinned “VisionFive 2 Quick Links” for the upstream status of that at VisionFive 2 Quick Links - #3 by dtometzki
I had to dig a little deep, but I found the official JH7110 upstream status page, which hopefully, will be updated when StarFive gets notified.
While looking through the u-boot based kernel installation in Debian i came over a nice example what the work towards upstream finally means:
root@starfive:~# apt-cache search linux-image
linux-headers-6.1.0-4-riscv64 - Header files for Linux 6.1.0-4-riscv64
linux-image-6.1.0-4-riscv64-dbg - Debug symbols for linux-image-6.1.0-4-riscv64
linux-image-6.1.0-4-riscv64 - Linux 6.1 for 64-bit RISC-V platforms
linux-image-riscv64-dbg - Debugging symbols for Linux riscv64 configuration (meta-package)
linux-image-riscv64 - Linux for 64-bit RISC-V platforms (meta-package)
… not yet real, but really ongoing …
There’s a decent chance the Linux kernel 6.3 will land enough of the patches to boot the board. Several patches have been accepted, and quite a few more are getting minor tune-ups. The 6.3 merge window is just about to open, I expect several more of these to get accepted. There is important work that hasn’t even been submitted yet, but it takes time.
[PATCH v1 00/17] Basic StarFive JH7110 RISC-V SoC support is where the latest U-boot support was sent in. There have some minor changes requested, still. So expect a V3 at least before those get accepted.
OpenSBI support seems to have landed, but that’s the element I know the least about.