Ubuntu 22.10 on Sipeed Lichee RV board

Things seems to have been ramping up on the RISC-V front over the last 12 months. Various open source projects have started offering official support, and new hardware is being released or announced regularly. As I write this, Sipeed’s Lichee RV has been around for quite a while (since 2021?) and soon there will be new hardware released which was announced before the end of 2022 with a quad core SoC and up to 16GB RAM. Following the Kinetic Kudu release, Canonical announced support for Sipeed’s Lichee RV RISC-V board on their blog and the wiki article seemed like it was fairly painless to try, so I gave it a try. The Lichee RV with dock is advertised as a Linux starter kit on the Sipeed’s AliExpress store, it’s a single core, uniprocessor board, based around the Allwinner D1 SoC, which comes with 512MB or 1GB RAM. The 1GB RAM version with the standard dock+wifi is the version I have been playing with. There is now a pro version of the dock available but that had not yet been announced at the time when I went shopping. Similar spec hardware which features a mini-hdmi and dual USB-C ports instead is available by another company called the Mango Pi MQ Pro, it’s based on an actual single circuit board, with no dock required.

The setup process to get started with the new Ubuntu release was straightforward, download the image, dd the image to an SD card and boot the device from it. It’s all headless since I have no LCD panel connected to the board and the HDMI port on the dock doesn’t seem to work out of the box when I tried it though it is listed as supported on 3rd party and vendor supplied distributions. The board was connected to a network using a USB Ethernet adapter so that I could continue setup but it is possible to obtain serial console access via the GPIO pins and USB-C.

The dock which the Lichee RV board connects to provides a Realtek RTL8723DS wifi (2.4GHz only) & Bluetooth controller. The wifi drivers for Ubuntu are provided via dkms which means they will be compiled during the install process. An hour and a half after invoking apt install licheerv-rtl8723ds-dkms the wifi driver was built, installed, and working.

Unlike the x86_64 builds of Ubuntu, the RISC-V build does not come with pre-compiled ZFS support, it needs to be installed via dkms. The single core uni-processor board took around 4.5 hours to complete apt install zfs-dkms. With ZFS support I could move on to attaching some disks to it. I wasted quite a lot time by fishing out an old USB 2.0 powered hub & attaching a set of disks to it but despite the power supply being a big heavy brick, it provided insufficient power to run anything more than a single hard disk safely. I tried attaching 3 disks and the board itself to the hub and the disks suffered (insufficient power to spin up the disks), tried 2 disks and the SBC but the power draw was too much which made the board unstable as disk I/O increased; it was amusing to see (imagining a scenario where you are trying to throttle the system in order to survive). After some experiments with online shopping I found a powered USB 3.1 hub which provided sufficient power to run the disks, the board still draws too much power to run disks and the SBC from the hub so the SBC ended up running from a separate power supply. I created a new mirrored pool on the pair of disks attached to the USB hub, and attached a third disk which contained another ZFS pool, then began rsyncing the data from the single disk pool to the new mirrored pool as a torture test to see how things would run, if at all. The new mirrored pool had ZFS compression=on set, though in hindsight it was a waste of CPU cycles as the end result compressratio was 1.03x. During the copy process the system suffered several module crashes related to ZFS functions which caused the copy process to stop, though the system was still available to SSH into and issue a reboot. Despite only having 1GB RAM, it took over a week to copy 2TB of data across the two pools, but many hours were lost between the module crashes and me noticing the issue to restart the process. Once the data was all copied across, it took several days to scrub the new mirrored pool. The load average around 5 throughout the entire period, from copying to scrubbing, waiting on i/o.

Since it’s a uniprocessor board, the system is unable to maintain a wifi connection and sustain prolonged CPU load, it drops off and I am not sure if it’s possible to teach it to retry yet. It has no such issue with USB Ethernet though, the CPU can be maxed out for some time and it’s still possible to reach the system, so perhaps the wifi driver may be a culprit or the lack of an antenna on this small piece of hardware.

There’s a lot of software available either packaged by Canonical or official binaries provided by projects themselves, so openjdk, zig, llvm, rust were readily available to install. These languages are provided as examples because they would have a hefty build time if you were starting from scratch generally but especially on a platform with limited resources.

With llvm installed I was able to compile bpftrace. Something is not quite right though, such as when running execsnoop, invoking the same command several times produced different results in the traced output, sometimes the exact command with arguments executed is traced, sometimes just that command was executed, and sometimes just blank, only a timestamp and process ID. Disabling systemd-resolved and switching to Unbound for the local resolver made a big difference to responsiveness of the system, noticeable when SSHing in, the password prompt returns quicker.

It’s nice to see that software support is there, it is an entry level system but being feature rich in terms of software readily available makes it a handy piece of hardware for experimenting which can be left on, lying around. My hope was to replace an ALIX 2c3 board with the Lichee RV for providing services like shell, routing (for the odd occasion when I try to use computers without wifi connectivity), and caching resolver via Unbound but I need to make progress with stable wifi connectivity before I can swap the systems around. Having ZFS support on such a platform is really cool, bugs have been reported in the Ubuntu launchpad for the module crashes: #2002663, #2002665, #2002666, #2002667, trying stock upstream versions are on the list to try next if I can get the build time down by building the modules on an emulated guest running elsewhere. There’s also a port of xv6 with D1 SoC support which is on my list to try out. For now my Lichee RV board sits running behind the ALIX board, it has been running 24×7 for the last couple of months, first month stress testing the board copying the data across and building bpftrace, second month mostly running on idle to see if it’s stable, while I focused on something else (organising media).

shortcoming
Performance garbage, single core, very cardy to use
Some software porting risc-v has wonderful bugs
No GPU, very laggy

Description in an advert on AliExpress by 3rd party for a D1 based RISC-V SBC.
Not sure what they mean by “very cardy” 🙂