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Luca Barbato
Luca Barbato

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Bringing up BPI-F3 - Part 1

#riscv #gentoo #bpif3

I like a lot non-x86 architectures, I still enjoy writing software for PowerPC even nowadays and I'm looking forward to see how SVE will be once there is hardware in the right price range.
Today it is the turn of RISC-V since there is eventually a, hopefully, nice board sporting a cpu with the RISC-V Vector Extension 1.0 that is now part of the RISC-V.

Where to start

The official documentation is available here.

The board comes with an empty eMMC, so either you start with a SD, or you need to upload a valid image using dfu.

Sadly the usb-c does not multiplex also the serial, so you'll need to connect the usual 3 pins with a 3.3V usbserial.

ERROR: CMD8 ERROR: sd f! l:76 bm:0 ERROR: emmc: invalid bootinfo magic code:0x0 ERROR: invalid bootinfo image. ERROR: entering download mode. ROM: usb download handler usb2d_initialize : enter Force usb FS mode! Controller Run usb rst int SETUP: 0x0 0x5 0x1 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x100 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x100 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x302 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x302 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x301 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x301 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x30a SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x30a SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x200 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x200 SETUP: 0x80 0x6 0x300
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Their images are Debian derivatives, I prefer Gentoo and since we have stage3 for rv64_lp64d-openrc, I guess I can give it a try.

Vendor-sources for kernel and bootloaders are available and I can piggy back over that image if I stumble over opensbi or u-boot or I run out of time sorting out the patches for linux-6.1.15

Prerequisites

Lazy Setup

The base images share this layout:

Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 256 767 256.0 KiB 8300 fsbl 2 768 895 64.0 KiB 8300 env 3 2048 4095 1024.0 KiB 8300 opensbi 4 4096 8191 2.0 MiB 8300 uboot 5 8192 532479 256.0 MiB 8300 bootfs 6 532480 <> <> GiB 8300 rootfs
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With the rootfs taking the space it needs.

The easiest way is to copy the first 5 partitions to the eMMC

# dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=1M count=259
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And then recreate the rootfs partition.

[!note] the initramfs does not support btrfs, nor the u-boot configuration. Until kernel and initramfs are replaced it is safer to stick to ext4 (I made this mistake).

Then the usual manual unpack of a stage3 and chroot described in Gentoo Handbook works.

Pitfalls known so far

  • Make sure to enable the serial ports in /etc/inittab 
s0:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 115200 ttyS0 vt100 s1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 115200 ttyS1 vt100
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  • The default u-boot command script is incomplete, if you want to use the nvme, you have to enter the u-boot console (press s) 
=> nvme scan => run nor_boot
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Coming next

I hadn't tried yet to:

  • update u-boot and change a bit its configuration
  • build a new kernel
  • put everything together to have btrfs on nvme

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