Wanted to say - Thank You!

Hi there,

I received my board a few weeks ago and spent time exploring risc-v and your board. A small summary: It’s fun to deal with.

So I wanted to thank you for your device and for your work. I wish you stay tuned:slight_smile:

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Development would accelerate with availability of proper documentation.

Specifically, the JH7110 “Software Developer Guide (Coming soon)”.

Kernel patches and such are nice to have, but are no substitute for documentation.

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I’d also like to add my thanks to all involved in developing and delivering the board too!

I recognise that there’s still a lot to come in terms of docs, drivers, upstreaming, and other system software and hardware development, and that can be frustrating for others with interests in lower-level work and other runtimes / OSes. However, between the low price, high performance, and relative ease of getting set up, it’s been a great platform for RISC-V Linux userland software development for me - I’ve been able to do much more with RISC-V than I could previously afford to.

And of course, it has been a lot of fun as well! :slightly_smiling_face:

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I want to say thank you to everyone who made this board possible and affordable. I love playing around with this board :grin:

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let me chime in here as well: nice board - actually the first to do risc-v at an acceptable price at all - seems to be on par with rockchip rk3566 or allwinner h616 in arm land performance and efficiency wise … the quality of the provided kernel sources is way above average as far as i can see compared to rockchip, allwinner, amlogic, mediatek etc. bsp trees and the responsiveness of the team behind the board to fix problems and move forward seems to be quite good as well … well done and a lot of thanks!

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Thanks also from my side. I have ordered one of the “Super Early Bird” boards, well aware of the troubles, that such an order implies. But it is not only working perfectly (to the degree i’ve tested it so far), it also delivers quite some excitement factors, of which the nvme slot is just one. It is really a nice, little and complete PC, which a lot of extra options.

Given that this is the very first affordable PC-like hardware for a new platform, the state of the software available with it is extremely good, IMO. My thanks thus also to the wider community of the people involved to make this possible.

In particular, i want to highlight the ongoing work towards upstream. I’m well aware, that this means a lot of seemingly extra work, often saved with ARM-based SOCs by companies like some mentioned above, who even distribute tools like gcc binary only under NDA. Meanwhile, i find it only unprofessional, to dump a new SOC together with a SDK full of barely working and unsupported drivers and tools downstream, often with questionable licenses absolutely not caring about long term support nor the responsibilities and liabilities of the companies downstream bringing the products finally into circulation.

This is where StarFive clearly raises the bar for the competition, and I wish that their efforts will pay off significantly. Along with a new platform, there is also the possibility of doing things more correctly than before. What I see here is a good start. Thanks, again.

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I shall also express my Bug ThumbsUp :+1: for good work put into VisionFive projects (both 1 and 2) AND make VF2 at reasonable price to purchase for a commoner / newcomer.

It’s also very interesting alternative to ubiquitious RPi and, while I dont blame RPi for their proprietary boot blobs, I didn’t like it from the very rise of RPi. Sigh, usual Broadcom business model to piss off Opensource community. Compared to RPi for a minimal system (say, a server or a router), there is the only closed source part: the tiny BootROM itself, which, hopefully gets released or reversed (and much of its code is already public like mmc driver). Given that IMG GPU Mesa support is on the way, with little mips firmware blob it is probably the most open and feature rich system to get today, and suitable both for general purpose usage and to be embedded somewhere like a uber-microcontroller board with lots of IO pins.

And yeah, with RISC-V Free and Open ISA which is so easy and logical to get your head on.

Of course, some design choices weren’t good enough, like sdcard speed being capped at 20M/s for some reason at circuitry level, or not implementing even a draft V extension. Some design choices both hurt performance alot but optimal for security like choosing U7 in-order but speculating execution core (hopefully sooner there will be cores in typical arm big.LITTLE configs: few OoO speculating and many inO ones, and in greater quantities per silicon area).

Power consumption sounds okay, 3W for idling is no fun for battery powered device shall it be inside phone or tablet, with about 7-10W when fully loaded (cpu, gpu, accels, crypto), but, personally, when I used RPi and it throttled even at simple CPU only loads reaching 85C easily, here it’s not even a concern even if you dont put a heatsink on it! Four core cryptographic benchmark for ten minutes made it to reach about 70C or so, cant remember but it was waaay below threshold. But yeah, to keep electronics run reliably I purchased an Odroid heatsink and fan.

I was a fan of mips isa before because of simplicity, now we get mips like with cruft removed, at cheap price. Really, good job and keep it going, I will be your loyal happy customer.

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