HiFive Unleashed

SiFive HiFive Unleashed is a RISC‑V development board featuring the Freedom U540 SoC. Its production is discontinued, but it's still supported by Sisyphus riscv64 port.

Regular Images and Simply Linux 9 were released for this board.

Quick start

TBD.

Setup with alt-rootfs-installer

You need alt-roofs-installer version 0.5.2 or higher.

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

Manual setup

Starting with U-Boot 2022.01, a U-Boot SPL for Unleashed has been made (file /usr/share/u-boot/sifive_unleashed/u-boot-spl.bin), which is recommended to be used instead of FSBL.

When using this U-Boot, installing an image for Unleashed is similar to Unmatched and can be done as described in HiFive_Unmatched#Installing_images_manually.

All references to the usr/share/u-boot/sifive_unmatched directory should be replaced with usr/share/u-boot/sifive_unleashed.

Disk image

To run images on SiFive HiFive Unleashed (FU540) SoC, follow these steps:

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 First Stage BootLoader (FSBL) and U-Boot :

root# sgdisk -a 1 \
        --new=3::+32K    --change-name=3:'fsbl'          --typecode=3:5B193300-FC78-40CD-8002-E86C45580B47 \
        --new=4::+8M:    --change-name=4:'opensbi-uboot' --typecode=4:2E54B353-1271-4842-806F-E436D6AF6985 \
/dev/sdX

Step 2.a. First Stage BootLoader (FSBL) and OpenSBI 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/fu540_boot/fsbl.bin of=/dev/sdX3 bs=1M
root# dd if=/run/media/root/<UUID>/usr/share/opensbi/sifive/fu540/firmware/fw_payload.bin of=/dev/sdX4 bs=1M
root# sync

Step 2.b. Alternative: download and install packages with FSBL and OpenSBI, then write down in partitions 3 and 4. For example, like this:

root# curl -O http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/ports/riscv64/Sisyphus/noarch/RPMS.classic/fu540-bootloaders-0-alt1.git54bfc90.noarch.rpm
root# curl -O http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/ports/riscv64/Sisyphus/noarch/RPMS.classic/opensbi-firmware-fu540-0.6-alt1.noarch.rpm
root# rpm -i fu540-bootloaders-0-alt1.git54bfc90.noarch.rpm
root# rpm -i opensbi-firmware-fu540-0.6-alt1.noarch.rpm
root# dd if=/usr/share/fu540_boot/fsbl.bin of=/dev/sdX3 bs=1M
root# dd if=/usr/share/opensbi/sifive/fu540/firmware/fw_payload.bin 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 filesystem image

To run the SiFive HiFive Unleashed (FU540) SoC with one of the rootfs images one could proceed through the following steps:

Step 0. Through this manual it is assumed that microSD card is at /dev/sdb. Let us create file systems at the microSD:

root$ sgdisk -g --clear \
        --new=2::+32K    --change-name=2:'fsbl'          --typecode=2:5B193300-FC78-40CD-8002-E86C45580B47 \
        --new=3::+8M:    --change-name=3:'opensbi-uboot' --typecode=3:2E54B353-1271-4842-806F-E436D6AF6985 \
        --new=1::-0      --change-name=1:'root'          --typecode=1:0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4 \
        /dev/sdb
root$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1
root$ mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
root$ tar -xpvf hifive-unleashed-riscv64.tar.xz -C /mnt

Step 1.a. The First Stage BootLoader (FSBL) and OpenSBI are placed inside the unpacked /mnt tree. Let us write them to the 2 and 3 partitions respectively, and then unmount /mnt partition.

root$ dd if=/mnt/usr/share/fu540_boot/fsbl.bin of=/dev/sdb2 bs=1M
root$ dd if=/mnt/usr/share/opensbi/sifive/fu540/firmware/fw_payload.bin of=/dev/sdb3 bs=1M
root$ sync; umount /mnt

Step 1.b. Alternative option: download and install the First Stage BootLoader (FSBL) and OpenSBI for FU540.

For example:

root$ curl -O http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/ports/riscv64/Sisyphus/noarch/RPMS.classic/fu540-bootloaders-0-alt1.git54bfc90.noarch.rpm
root$ curl -O http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/ports/riscv64/Sisyphus/noarch/RPMS.classic/opensbi-firmware-fu540-0.6-alt1.noarch.rpm
root$ rpm -i fu540-bootloaders-0-alt1.git54bfc90.noarch.rpm
root$ rpm -i opensbi-firmware-fu540-0.6-alt1.noarch.rpm
root$ dd if=/usr/share/fu540_boot/fsbl.bin of=/dev/sdb2 bs=1M
root$ dd if=/usr/share/opensbi/sifive/fu540/firmware/fw_payload.bin of=/dev/sdb3 bs=1M
root$ sync; umount /mnt

Step 3. System at microSD is ready to boot. For a graphical system, the system setup is performed through VNC.