So according to Debian GNU/Linux Is Now Officially Supported on the RISC-V Architecture – RISC-V International Debian now officially supports RISC-V. Is it too much to ask to get an official Trixie image (even unstable, who cares)?
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If you are running as a headess server it would be OK now. Trixie is not officially released (yet) ref Debian version history - Wikipedia so a lot of hardware that is working (GPU, VPU) may be disabled if you install Trixie in its curent state.
If you do not mind loosing functionality and have a 3.3 volt serial cable to debug booting problems it is simple enough to point your apt sources to trixie. But be prepaired for a painful journey for leaving the well trodden path. But on the flip side you will probably learn a lot. Just expect a lot of downloading as everything is updated often in the debian testing branch.
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Thanks for the prompt reply.
I’m trying to compile a library I created for RISC-V. It’s a graphical library so I’d rather not go headless.
I resorted to compiling it using docker on Windows for now (GitHub - andreamancuso/docker-debian-riscv64). Naturally it is painfully slow as it’s emulated. But it does work.
All that being said, I am thinking of cloning my sd card and attempting the ‘journey’. I own a USB-TTL cable so I’d be able to debug issues (to a point, as I am no expert).
I suppose I could share my findings here.
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Do not forget to join the Debian mailing lists and report bugs. People who are willing to lead in new paths through the jungle with a machete in one hand and a keyboard in the other are far apart with few in between.
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Mate, your timing is truly remarkable. Literally a minute after reading your reply I did a cock up and have just re-flashed my sd card. I have to try again.
Good idea about joining the Debian mailing list. I hope to have meaningful questions for the community soon.
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So my very first issue has to do with UsrMerge - Debian Wiki I just sent an email to the mailing list, we’ll see what the experts say.
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So as hinted, repointing the sources to Trixie didn’t work.
I am taking a different approach: upgrading to newer versions of the debian ports. It was successful, however X11 is seriously slow, to the point where the desktop environment is practically unusable.
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will take time at a guess this post about the VisionFive 2 (same RISC-V SoC) comes to mind.
My guess would be that it is rendering the GUI using the CPU because there are no blobs for the kernelversion that you are using. And the upstream HDMI driver is not fully finished either. Basically all hardware acceleration in drawing the GUI is unavailable (yet). You need to wait on Imagination Technology Ltd. to finish their driver.
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Meanwhile I have realized that I can’t go beyond the 20230724T141507Z debian port, which at least gifted me Trixie on my Mars. That said, I think I can probably try newer ports but I can’t figure out how.
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I was able to install the latest Debian Trixie - after installing a bleeding edge version of U-Boot. No HDMI capabilities as discussed. But at least I can now compile software without headaches, and, with some help from a third party, I was even able to setup WiFi.
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I have not seen any other company push as many RISC-V SoC kernel patches upstream as StarFive, I suspect that their board will be most functional of any with trixie when Debian release it.
The next Long Term Support kernel should be 6.12 and the amount of patches, to enable support for devices in the SoC, from StarFive is probanly the highest of any RISC-V SoC.
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