What would be your top 10 OSes/Kernels/Hypervisors you wish would work with this board?

VisionFive 2 （English Forum)
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What would be your top 10 open source OSes/Kernels/Hypervisors that you would like to see working (eventually) with the StarFive JH7110, and JH7100, SoC’s (Listed in alphabetical order to slightly reduce my personal bias) ?

  • Android (or derivative LineageOS, GrapheneOS, …)
  • bhyve (type-2 hypervisor FreeBSD kernel)
  • ChibiOS/RT
  • DragonFly BSD
  • FreeBSD
  • FreeRTOS
  • GNU Hurd
  • Haiku OS (open source recreation of BeOS)
  • Kernel-based Virtual Machine (type-2 hypervisor Linux kernel)
  • KolibriOS (Written in i586 assembly, so a difficult port )
  • NetBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • OpenIndiana (distribution forked from OpenSolaris)
  • Proxmox Virtual Environment (type-2 hypervisor Linux kernel)
  • Qubes OS (requires Xen)
  • Redox (Unix-like Operating System written in Rust)
  • ROS (Robot Operating System)
  • seL4 microkernel (SEcure L4)
  • Tizen
  • Xen (type-1 hypervisor)

0 voters

I left out almost all major Linux distributions in the list above just because there are so many (goto the wikipedia article on Linux distributions and click on the image to the right twice (found above “Timeline of the development of main Linux distributions”) and when adding the poll I was told no more than 20 items. And once the Linux kernel has been ported to function with new hardware and added to at least one Linux distribution the effort required to migrate those changes to other Linux distributions is relatively negligible, at least, when compared to a effort required for a full port to a different kernel and operating system. I’m sure the people supporting a Linux distribution do not think of it as negligible.

I know I missed lots, I do not know everything (I was limited to 20 items at most), so if something you care about is missing above add a comment.

3

Two microkernels of interest:
Helen OS [ http://www.helenos.org/ ]
Phoenix-RTOS [ http://phoenix-rtos.com/ ]

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4

I hope to be able to run it with Haiku OS as my main OS. But also interested in running it with Ubuntu.

I think the Haiku dev community will try to extend its support for RISC-V to this board.

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5

The survey was odd.

Please put Debian, Archlinux, Fedora, Fedora Silverblue on that list in the survey.

Thank you.

Also, I have just been made aware, Buildroot-based Debian is different from a full-blow Debian distro with access to package repos. I do hope there will be repos with packages we can update with the usual package manager software rather than having to rewrite an entire image to an sdcard. My other concern is wanting to turn on the board and run the distro entirely on an nvme. Will there be arrangements to make that happen rather than being forced to resort to sdcard at the moment?

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What, no Armbian nor ESXi? :grin:

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Technically it would be Riscvbian, since there is no ARM in a RISC-V SoC. An ESXi type 1 hypervisor would be interesting, and might happen.

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Read the text under the poll. TL;DR I was limited of 20 items in poll, way way way way too many Linux distributions. You can always make your own poll of your top 20 Linux distributions. I personally find it impossible to pick only 20 Linux Distributions, even if I ignore android and all its forks.
e.g.
Slackware, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch,
Mageia, Ubuntu, ALT Linux, PCLinuxOS, Lubuntu,
Xubuntu, Linux Mint, Devuan, Kali Linux, Manjaro,
SteamOS, Gentoo, Pentoo, Rocky Linux, Qubes OS,
Trustix, Apline, Bodhi, Void, Deepin, Pepermint,
Mandriva, BlackArch, NixOS, Ubuntu MATE, Kubuntu,
Ubuntu Kylin, Element OS, AV Linux, Mageia, OpenMandriva
LibreELEC, ArchLabs , antiX, Lakka, MX Linux,
Nobara, Nitrux, Archcraft, EndeavourOS, elementary,
Pop!_OS, Garuda, Lite, Zorin, riscvbian (It, at a guess, will be the RISC-V distribution based on ARMbian),
Knoppix, Red Hat Linux, Puppy Linux, Linux From Scratch, … and I am pretty sure that I have easily missed a hundred Linux distributions from my short list.

There are Debian risc-v packages that have moved from “sid” to “testing” and “testing” is only one step away from the next “stable” release. So there is hope for a full RISC-V RV64GC stable Debian distribution soon.

My guess would be yes (eventually).
The I suspect that the boot order would probably go something like:
32KiB ROM inside SoC at powerup/reset is automatically loaded into the 32KiB CPU L1 cache which is temporarily used as SRAM, it auto runs and configures enough clocks, powers up and enables just enough hardware to load the next stage (spl-u-boot) in the boot up sequence probably from QSPI NOR FLASH (128KiB has been allocated on the flash) into the 2MiB CPU L2 cache which is temporarily used as SRAM. Once executed and decompressed it’s job is to bring up and enable all clocks and and hardware including the DDR memory controller. And then to load the next stage of boot loader (u-boot) from QSPI NOR FLASH into (2/4/8GiB) DDR RAM (3MiB has been allocated on the flash). Once executed and decompressed it’s job is to provide access to all hardware load up Linux, which in theory at least (If the driver is small enough) could be from a EFI boot partition on a NVMe drive. There is a lot more to the boot up sequence than I have said, but that would be the big brush strokes.

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Technically it would be Riscvbian, since there is no ARM in a RISC-V SoC.

I know that, but an Armbian contributor (balbes150) has already supplied several Armbian images for other RISC-V boards. :person_shrugging:

10

Fuchsia

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11

Gentoo
OpenWrt

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