HiFive Unmatched

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HiFive Unmatched from SiFive is a Mini-ITX board powered by SiFive Freedom U740 SoC. It is supported by Sisyphus riscv64 port. HiFive Umatched boards are used as build nodes for this port.

The board is supported by un-def distribution kernel since 5.12.18-alt1.rv64 and u-boot since 2021.07-alt1.

ALT Images

HiFive Unmatched is supported by weekly regular builds: Regular/riscv64.

Images can be written via alt-rootfs-installer or manually.

Graphical images (e.g. Xfce, MATE) are designed to work with a video card by default. If there is no video card, you can access the graphics via VNC: Regular/riscv64#VNC .

Write-in with alt-rootfs-installer

HiFive Unmatched target is supported by alt-roofs-installer 0.5.2 or newer.

root# alt-rootfs-installer --target=HiFive-Unmatched --image-in=/path/to/<image>-riscv64.img.xz --media=/dev/sdX

You can add --vnc=1 parameter here to enable the VNC server (e.g. if you don't have a video card installed). See Regular/riscv64#VNC .

Installing images manually

Step 0. Image write-in and mounting:

root$ xzcat /path/to/<image>-riscv64.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdx bs=4M status=progress 
root$ udiskctl mount /dev/sdX2

The root partition will be mounted in /run/media/root/<UUID>

Step 1. Adding partitions for U-Boot SPL (Secondary Program Loader) and U-Boot :

root$ sgdisk -a 1 \
 --new=3:34:2081         --change-name=3:'spl' --typecode=3:5B193300-FC78-40CD-8002-E86C45580B47 \
 --new=4:2082:10273      --change-name=4:'uboot'  --typecode=4:2E54B353-1271-4842-806F-E436D6AF6985 \
/dev/sdX

Step 2.a. U-Boot SPL (Secondary Program Loader) and U-Boot binaries are located on the root partition of the image. Write them into partitions 3 and 4, respectively:

root$ dd if=/run/media/root/<UUID>/usr/share/u-boot/sifive_unmatched/u-boot-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX3 bs=1M
root$ dd if=/run/media/root/<UUID>/usr/share/u-boot/sifive_unmatched/u-boot.itb of=/dev/sdX4 bs=1M
root$ sync

Step 2.b. Alternative: download the latest version of the package u-boot-sifive. You can use the link from https://packages.altlinux.org/en/sisyphus_riscv64/srpms/u-boot-sifive/rpms/.

Extract files u-boot-spl.bin and u-boot.itb from the package and write them into partitions 2 и 3, respectively:

user$ rpm2cpio u-boot-sifive-*riscv64.rpm | cpio -vi --to-stdout './usr/share/u-boot/sifive_unmatched/u-boot-spl.bin' > u-boot-spl.bin
user$ rpm2cpio u-boot-sifive-*riscv64.rpm | cpio -vi --to-stdout './usr/share/u-boot/sifive_unmatched/u-boot.itb' > u-boot.itb
root$ dd if=u-boot-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX3 bs=1M
root$ dd if=u-boot.itb of=/dev/sdX4 bs=1M
root$ sync

Step 3. Switch boot mode from EFI to extlinux.conf. To do this, we need to remove the boot toggle from the fat32 partition:

root$ parted /dev/sdX set 1 boot off

Root on NVME

The file system can be copied to NVME and used as system root. For that, you can do the following.

Create a partition on NVME using fdisk. For example.

Format the partition:

mkfs.ext4 -m1 -L ROOT /dev/nvme0n1p1

Mount the partition:

mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt

Copy rootfs content to the NVME partition:

rsync -ax / /mnt

The -x option allows to copy rootfs content only, and ignore other mounted file systems. Copying can take a long time.

Have a look at UUID of NVME partition, for example, this way:

lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE       LABEL UUID                                 ...
...
└─nvme0n1p1 ext4   1.0   ROOT  dc155086-4ee4-42f6-87be-bcc67b2b93e6 ...

Put this UUID value into /mnt/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf:

append root=UUID=dc155086-4ee4-42f6-87be-bcc67b2b93e6 ...

Also, update the root partition UUID in /mnt/etc/fstab:

UUID=dc155086-4ee4-42f6-87be-bcc67b2b93e6       /       ext4 ...

EFI on NVME

TBD.

Grub

TBD.