Blog: 2023-08-29
Ok I got my starfive visionfive2 to boot, using their official 202306 debian image. Unzipped the image from the SD folder and flashed it with BalenaEtcher. I wasn't seeing any output printed, but after I watched a video that told me the way to put the boot pins, I followed their instruction to make switch 1 away and 2 is towards the number of switch.
After the usual boot I was presented with a graphical login!
user starfive
got me logged in.
The first thing I did was follow the quick start guide's instructions to resize the SD card system, which worked while it was running just fine. The key was an interactive fdisk followed by a resize2fs. Here's how it all looked before:
user@starfive:~$ whoami user user@starfive:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 1.7G 0 1.7G 0% /dev tmpfs 390M 3.5M 386M 1% /run /dev/mmcblk1p4 2.5G 2.2G 267M 90% / tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 12K 5.0M 1% /run/lock tmpfs 390M 132K 390M 1% /run/user/1000
And here's how it looks now:
user@starfive:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk1
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.38.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
GPT PMBR size mismatch (5529599 != 124735487) will be corrected by write.
The backup GPT table is not on the end of the device. This problem will be corrected by write.
This disk is currently in use - repartitioning is probably a bad idea.
It's recommended to umount all file systems, and swapoff all swap
partitions on this disk.
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4, default 4):
Partition 4 has been deleted.
Command (m for help): n
Partition number (4-128, default 4):
First sector (34-124735454, default 221184):
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size{K,M,G,T,P} (221184-124735454, default 124733439):
Created a new partition 4 of type 'Linux filesystem' and of size 59.4 GiB.
Partition #4 contains a ext4 signature.
Do you want to remove the signature? [Y]es/[N]o: n
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Syncing disks.
user@starfive:~$ sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk
mmcblk0 mmcblk0boot1 mmcblk1 mmcblk1p2 mmcblk1p4
mmcblk0boot0 mmcblk0rpmb mmcblk1p1 mmcblk1p3
user@starfive:~$ sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk1p4
resize2fs 1.46.6-rc1 (12-Sep-2022)
Filesystem at /dev/mmcblk1p4 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 8
The filesystem on /dev/mmcblk1p4 is now 15564032 (4k) blocks long.
user@starfive:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1.7G 0 1.7G 0% /dev
tmpfs 390M 3.5M 386M 1% /run
/dev/mmcblk1p4 59G 2.2G 57G 4% /
tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 12K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 390M 132K 390M 1% /run/user/1000
I can also see the SSD storage is recognized:
user@starfive:~$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS mtdblock0 31:0 0 256K 0 disk mtdblock1 31:1 0 3M 0 disk mtdblock2 31:2 0 1M 0 disk mmcblk1 179:0 0 59.5G 0 disk ├─mmcblk1p1 179:1 0 2M 0 part ├─mmcblk1p2 179:2 0 4M 0 part ├─mmcblk1p3 179:3 0 100M 0 part └─mmcblk1p4 179:4 0 59.4G 0 part / mmcblk0 179:8 0 14.7G 0 disk mmcblk0boot0 179:16 0 4M 1 disk mmcblk0boot1 179:24 0 4M 1 disk nvme0n1 259:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
but I haven't done anything with it yet. This blog seems to have instructions on how to get the board booting from SSD:
https://jamesachambers.com/starfive-visionfive-2-debian-ssd-boot-guide/
But I note they talk about using heat sinks, and I don't even have a fan attached to my lil cpu. Honestly the physical setup is tricky, but I think they assume you know exactly what you're doing. No "magic smoke" yet, just Debian ;)