2022-01-06

Debian on Hifive Unmatched

Many moons ago I received a box with the SiFive Unmatched miniITX board. It features a riscv64 CPU from SiFive in a PC formfactor. The list of technological wonders involved to make this board a reality is surprisingly long! I mounted the board into an unused LianLi case (wonderful aluminum box!), I even managed to receive an unused Radeon graphics card from one of the local nerds. The board came with a working operating system on sdCard. I managed to install Ubuntu on the new shiny NVMe disk. Unfortunately the Ubuntu install had grabbed all of the NVMe disk. No easy installing Debian GNU/Linux, alpineLinux or whatever anlongside. So the box was collecting dust for a while.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched

Turns out, that others were indeed busy and Debian can now be installed using stock parts from unstable. Yay!

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/SiFive/HiFiveUnmatched

The page lists the commands to create a bootable image and write it to sdCard. That works well. Now I wanted to have Debian installed on the NVMe disk, "without" taking up all space :) Who knows, alpinelinux is apparently working on a riscv64 port, and probably others as well ...

Upon reading said instructions it occurred to me, that noone can stop me from installing onto the NVMe disk rather than the disk-image file. It took a while, and a few tricks due to limited space in /boot, but now Debian is running on the NVMe disk:

> root@unmatched:~# uname -a
> Linux unmatched 5.15.0-2-riscv64 #1 SMP Debian 5.15.5-2 (2021-12-18) riscv64 GNU/Linux
> root@unmatched:~# date
> Thu Jan  6 21:42:00 UTC 2022
> root@unmatched:~# df -h / /boot
> Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/nvme0n1p4  7.8G  1.3G  6.1G  18% /
> /dev/nvme0n1p3  507M   76M  432M  15% /boot
> root@unmatched:~# grep PRETTY_NAME /etc/os-release
> PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid"

Apparently the boot loader is still read from the sdCard. But fixing that might be only a flip of a switch away ...

Really not bad for an evening! Thanks to all the restless souls, who make such wonders possible!

Cheers,

~ew

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