Working Plasma on VisionFive-2 – cordlandwehr
New yr, new RISC-V Yocto weblog put up o/ Once I wrote my final put up, I did actually not anticipate my model new VisionFive-2 board to search out its method to me so quickly… However nicely, every week in the past it was immediately there. Whereas unpacking I shortly contemplated over my made plans to organize a Plasma Bigscreen RaspberryPi 4 demo board for this yr’s FOSDEM.
Apparent conclusion: “Screw it! Let’s do the demo on the VisionFive-2!” — And there we’re:
After some preliminary bumpy steps besides up a primary self-compiled U-boot and Kernel (Should you unbox a brand new board, it’s worthwhile to do a bootloader and firmware replace first! In any other case it is not going to boot the most recent VisionFive Kernel) it was surprisingly simple to organize Yocto to construct a core-image-minimal that actually boots the entire approach up.
Sadly after these first blissful hours, the final week was filled with dealing with the horrors of closed-source binary drivers for the GPU. Though Creativeness promised to supply an open supply driver at a while, proper now there’s solely the answer to make use of the closed supply PVR driver. After numerous making an attempt, guessing and and evaluating the boot and init sequences of the reference picture to the darkish display screen in entrance of me, I got here up with:
- a brand new visionfive2-graphics Yocto bundle for the closed supply driver blobs
- a fork of Mesa that makes use of a really heavy patch set for the PVR driver adaptions; all patches are taken from the VisionFive 2 buildroot configurations
- and a few configs for making the system begin with doing an preliminary modeset
The end result proper now:
VisionFive-2 machine with Plasma-Bigscreen (KWin working by way of Wayland), SD card picture constructed by way of Yocto, KDE software program by way of KDE’s Yocto layers, Kernel and U-Boot being the most recent fork variations from StarFive
Truly, the total UI even feels a lot smoother than on my RPi4, which is kind of cool. I’m not positive the place I’ll finish in about 3 weeks with some extra debugging and patching. However I’m very assured which you can see a working RISC-V board with onboard GPU and working Plasma Shell, whenever you go to the KDE stall at FOSDEM in February ????
For people who find themselves keen on Yocto, right here is the WIP patch set: https://github.com/riscv/meta-riscv/pull/382