from Hacker News

First Impressions of the VisionFive 2

by stevefolta on 2/18/23, 4:55 AM with 21 comments

  • by trissylegs on 2/18/23, 10:04 AM

    The main problems Ive had with it so far. Is the graphics. Kernel is fine but the userspace was difficult to get working. A Chinese user on the forums had figured it out. You need the proprietary Vulkan + GLES libraries from IMG and the fork of mesa to get EGL, etc. Which doesn't work with libglvnd so some packages won't install because they explicitly depend on libglvnd.

    And the kernel has device mapper disabled so I couldn't use kpartx to mount a drive image with partitions. Also means dm-crypt or LVM2 won't either.

    But these kinda kinks can be worked out I think so I hope we get a good out of the box experience in a few months.

  • by snvzz on 2/18/23, 8:20 AM

    >no heatsink/fan

    CPU can take some quite industrial range (125C? I know I've seen a number somewhere...), and will throttle starting at 85C. In practice, it will get to 75C in long compiling sessions. Thus, it doesn't really need a heatsink.

    However, you might want to install a m.2 nvme, in which case you'll definitely want that heatsink as you'll have more heat. I went with XU4Q's (from ODROID), which is a passive solution, a tall heatsink. It fits in place w/o issue and doesn't disturb m.2. CPU tops out at around 57C now.

    I notice that, in the pictures, the reviewer did not install the 4x spacers that shipped with the board. This board will not sit evenly on a desk, as the m.2 slot protrudes; it might interfer with cooling. That'd explain 90C where I got 75C.

  • by zX41ZdbW on 2/18/23, 10:39 AM

    My friend recently bought Vision Five 2, and we've tested its performance, comparing to Vision Five 1. Here are the results: https://twitter.com/ClickHouseDB/status/1619767689861550081

    The outcomes: - it shows several times better results, but we suspect that the previous result was misconfigured; - the performance is still way behind Raspberry Pi, Rock Pi and other AArch64 machines.

    We are building for RISC-V with cross-compilation, details here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/31398

  • by mouse_ on 2/18/23, 10:04 AM

    Supposedly this thing comes with the Imagination Technologies BXE-4-32 GPU. Anyone know if this is supported out of the box by Linux/Mesa or if it's a black box? I've been burned by evil secretive GPUs in SBCs before.

  • by sph on 2/18/23, 7:47 AM

    Are they supposed to be shipping the dual GbE yet?

    Because I ordered it in October, got only a paypal receipt with a smartfire.cn email and nothing else. Sent them an email early this month to have a status update, and no reply.

    I just wonder if I got "scammed", with no way whatsoever to check my order status. I'll give it a few more days and contact Paypal for a refund. Can't say I'm pleased with the customer service.

  • by psychphysic on 2/18/23, 12:02 PM

    I have a stick on heatsink, tiny fan plugged into the vf2 fan header (2 wires don't think it's controlled in anyway) and a 3D printed case[0].

    I don't know where the temp sensor is on the board but it read 54 (about 24 above ambient), now it sits at about 32 (ambient +12). I could only get the minimal image69 running so not much practical use at the minute.

    [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/104dayd/i_designed_a...

  • by drmpeg on 2/18/23, 3:26 PM

    The https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/ repository is slower than cold snot on a doorknob. Unfortunately, trying https://deb.debian.org/debian-ports/ instead causes problems.

  • by lloydatkinson on 2/18/23, 12:22 PM

    Why is this such a ridiculously bad page on mobile?