Howto Custom Made VisionFive2 SD Card Image (RISC-V)

VisionFive2 is a single board computer with RISC-V JH7110 CPU that is making by StarFive. It comes with either 4GB or 8GB RAM and your can choose NVMe SSD or eMMC model. You even can have both NVMe SSD and eMMC on one single board too. It comes with SD Card slot by default. It runs with normal smartphone SuperCharge 3.0 charger. The temperature of the CPU is between 45°c and 85°c when turning on. I recommend to run the board with heatsink or metal case.

Step 1 :

Download the latest version of VisionFive2 Debian Desktop SD Card image.

StarFive Official VisionFive2 Debian images

Select OneDrive, folder 202306 and folder sd to download the image file, where 202306 is the latest at the time of this writing.

Extract it and burn the .img file to SD card (16GB or more) with balenaEtcher.

Step 2 :

Placing the VisionFive2 with Ethernet ports at the bottom. Set the switch on the top left corner of the board to ON for the upper row (1) and set the switch on the lower row (2) to OFF in order to boot from SD Card. Default is both ON.

Boot up VisionFive2 with the SD Card and login to the mininal desktop. Username is user and password is starfive, while root username is root and password is also starfive. If you do not need GNOME, just uninstall it.

Select Terminal and type the following commands to uninstall the GNOME desktop to make the device command line only and it is optional.

sudo apt update
sudo apt autoremove --purge gnome*

Step 3 :

Update the hosts file.

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add starfive next to the 127.0.0.1 localhost making it to look like 127.0.0.1 localhost starfive.

Step 4 :

Resize the partition to fit the larger size SD card. It is because the official image is only around 3GB size that is insufficient to install any software.

df -h

To find out the partition with / directory. For example, /dev/mmcblk1p4.

To delete the partition /dev/mmcblk1p4.

sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk1

Type d to delete.

Select 4 (or default is already 4).

Type n and type 4 (or default is already 4).

Type w to write the changes to the SD Card.

sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk1p4

Type Enter for all the questions or inputs.

Double check the partition and to confirm that the / partition is occupied all the capacity of the SD card.

df -h

Step 5 :

Change the SSH setting to use user’s password to login.

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Uncomment #PasswordAuthentication yes to PasswordAuthentication yes.

Step 6 :

Reset the current time zone.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Generate English locales.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Select all prefix is en items and set your country as default.

Step 7 :

Set /tmp to tmpfs.

sudo cp -v /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/

sudo systemctl enable tmp.mount
sudo systemctl start tmp.mount

Step 8 :

Update the system.

sudo nano /etc/apt/source.list

Replace with the following.

deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib
deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib

Save it and run the following commands to update the system.

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade && sudo apt autoremove

Then you can install your desired softwares. Such as

sudo apt install net-tools lsof pciutils

Make sure you have installed net-tools. Otherwise, you cannot run sudo ifconfig command.

KNOWN ISSUE :

sudo reboot does not really reboot the device, it just only turn it off instead. To power on the device, you can either re-plug in the power cable. Wait for a few seconds. When green light is flashing, the device is turning on.

There is no SWAP partition.

WORKAROUND

sudo apt -y install watchdog
sudo systemctl enable watchdog.service
sudo systemctl start watchdog.service

Samiux
OSCE OSCP OSWP
August 12, 2023, Hong Kong, China
Updated on October 17, 2023, Hong Kong, China

REFERENCE