Although 4K resolution is supported and we have improved the desktop performance, there is still frame drop issue during video playback . Thus, it is recommended to switch to 1080p60 resolution for a smooth video playback experience.
Please avoid runningapt upgradeas it will override the existing customized mesa and linux-libc-dev versions provided.
This debian image contains FFmpeg, Firefox and VLC by default.
Please update the SPI flash to the latest SPL/U-Boot binaries if you would like to try nvme booting (set boot mode as QSPI boot).
Good news. Thanks a lot to the team for the update.
The 4 tips you give in your message seem to be a way to avoid providing compatible hardware.
The first three are Debian specific and are of no use if you don’t use Debian (are you paid by Debian ?). Please provide real open source drivers for the graphics hardware instead.
People here first paid for this piece of hardware without even knowing it will exist, and are technically skilled enough to distinguish between tech failures/issues and marketing blabla. Know your customers.
The fourth tip, is about manual boot mode selection., will this be software (u-boot) feasible some day ? That seems easy, to confirm. My dream is to be able to boot over a network located image.
err… you do realise Debian is an open source project… paid by who?
The reality is that this is that StarFive based their engineering release on Debian for very good technical reasons, not bribery. And since it is Debian based it kind of follows that Debian will get the most attention, and StarFive’s work will be Debian-centric.
I believe they are commenting and posting from a standpoint that the only officially released engineering prototype operating system is a special version of Debian. Therefore, it stands to reason they would offer tips or help about that specific operating system.
I am of the opinion that we should strive to get ONE option working, and then attempt including more. Since Debian is a known quantity, it is easy to understand the changes made, and what is needed to move forward.
Nothing against them to concentrate on debian. They could have chosen any other linux but that is absolutely ok. And, to be honest, the tone of some people here astounds me a lot. This is a development board on a fairly new platform…it is the purpose of those boards to get them early into the wild, so that an infrastructure can be build by a community.
That said, there is clearly one issue, I agree on and that are the graphics drivers and the correspondent mesa stack. Not, that they make everything open source. Won’t happen for the firmware e.g. and that’s the same on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. But the kernel driver and everything above should be given to us in exactly the versions used on that debian image.
Alongside with distribution agnostic information on how the stack is supposed to work.
And, at least what I can see, the buildroot mesa version is 22.1.3 but the installed stack in the debian image is 22.3.5, so why isn’t there a site where we could at least download the needed patches for that one?
I understand your point. There is some kind of provocation here
An engineering Release (EngRel) is part of the fabrication quality process. I expect them to have a Debian EngRel, a FreeBSD EngRel, etc … whatever they want, the more, the better. But please please don’t ship that to the customer. Use these EngRels to tweak the beast possible bios/firmware Pre-OS environment and ship that optimized version to us.
I just saying that I buy hardware from hardware manufacturers , and software/OSes fro software manufacturers. Intel is not providing its own version of Firefox, mesa, etc.
If Firefox / mesa is not working enough, change the firmware, not Firefox/mesa, and, when the tests are OK. ship the firmware… This helps everyone (BSD included).
I would be totally on your side if it was Intel, AMD, MSI, Asus or meanwhile RaspberryPi Foundation. They have built up a large development team, established codebase and all that. Pi 5 e.g. is sold as “The everything computer. Optimised.”. Not as a development board. These two things are not comparable! The VF2 is for people to experiment with RISC-V, the corresponding codebase and software infrastructure, not primarily as a SBC for drop into home automation or other daily use scenarios. If all goes well, that will be the case in 1-2 years. And to reach that goal, the board is released in its current state.
To perhaps better understand my point, a short clarification on why I personally bought a VF2 and what my goal is:
I’m sick of Intel/AMD and meanwhile partly also ARM rolling out beta releases of their hardware and board manufacturers doing the same on the mainboard and/or gpu side of things. Im tired of getting to know there is something like an ME (intel) or PSP (AMD) doing some magical stuff which I cannot see or influence.
I want in lets say late 2024 or early 2025, when my next deskop PC will be a topic, buy a RISC-V based computer. Something like the Milk-V Pioneer. Just a bit cheaper and with faster CPU cores. And I want to run Archlinux on that one. So all I’m doing right now for the VF2 helps that goal. That is my motivation.
Besides that, after playing around with the VF2 for some weeks now, I’ll buy a second one with a large SSD as my new home server, replacing my old Intel Atom based box.
That are my thoughts regarding that topic and for me, I feel I spent the money well on the VF2.
I also rate VF2 higher than that. Even its existence is a real asset.
My VF2 was the first usable home server machine and I use as such for 1 year now. Is is just not used to view movies and I don’t understand why we are loosing so much time on that (it is probably the job of the GPU vendor).
This release gives NVME booting and for me, this is much more important than Mesa/Firefox because it impacts all systems. And Big thank you to the team for this OS-independent feature.
I still expect some OS-independent features like boot order, not using my physical hands to switch the boot device, etc
Most Debian architectures (ppc64, ) don’t provide GPU acceleration enough to make them usable as a home pc.
Does anyone know the exact packages that are custom that apt upgrade will break? Couldnt we use “apt-mark hold” to prevent those packages from being modified and update everything else?
I guess I can’t talk about the GPU or the other three letter competitor and how they are working on drivers. Anyhow, someone seems to be working on something. Hopefully the community will receive the data it needs soon.
Is there a specific reason to not have all controllers enabled in the kernel’s cgroup support? not having cpusets as an enabled controller makes using nomad hard.
