Milk-V Duo S / Debian ARM64 / Ollama / Qemu / ADB

[BoryaGames]

Hello, viewer! So, there’s isn’t any public images to utilize a good distro like Debian on Milk-V Duo S, so I decided to make one, but I never compiled a kernel or a bootloader or knew how to combine them with a rootfs. But in the past week after some problems, kernel panics and ordering a better SD card, I made a purr-fect image.

Debian (SID) for Milk-V Duo S (ARM64 core, SD card) working stable
Wi-FI and Bluetooth are working
USB works as well
Tested smollm:135m AI model from ollama
Fastfetch and QEMU and a lot of drivers for various things preinstalled
Fits on 8 GB SD/TF-card

Download from MEGA [6.99 GB]

Screenshots:

NOTE: This image also has preinstalled ADBD and while making the image I accidentally got ADBD working over USB, after finishing the image I couldn’t repeat that even using Wi-Fi, though.

After flashing the image, you can access using the default Milk-V documentation (use ssh [email protected] with password milkv).

If you want to disable flashing heartbeat LED:
echo none > /sys/class/leds/blue/trigger && echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/blue/brightness

I also tried adding Arduino support, but it got a lot of issues.

[hannahKobain]

ARM64 only? No RISC-V yet?

[BoryaGames]

Debian for RISC-V is already done by Fishwaldo, so I do not see any point in making RISC-V image.

[urostor]

Hi thanks but why sid and not trixie?

[BoryaGames]

Hello! That’s a great question, which I do not know the answer to
I did use some parts of Fishwaldo’s Debian for RISC-V, and the mmdebstrap command he had was for sid, I saw that and thought about changing it, but decided to keep.

[urostor]

Fishwaldo used Sid because there weren’t riscv64 packages in bookworm (the current debian at the time). Now trixie has this architecture and it’s stable.

[Nguyen_Thi_Hue]

hi; i wonder is there diffirent upload storage like torrent ?

[BoryaGames]

Hello! I can upload to a different storage, as long as it’s available to me. I tried hosting a torrent before, which failed with people not being able to download my file, I suspect you need a publicly available IP for that (with an open port), which I don’t have. If you’re sure I don’t need a publicly available IP, I might try hosting a torrent again, maybe this time it will work.

[Nguyen_Thi_Hue]

Download from MEGA [6.99 GB]. the mega service have time limit for large file. so can u upload the file to something like gofile.io or make the image smaller(i don’t think someone need qemu or ollama on 512mb Ram or that is too slow for tokens from ai) . how did you build it from source-code; i tried it but fail for sdk-v2 arm-core ( the official image does not have package manager which is very limited)

[BoryaGames]

Here you are - Download from GoFile.
I could make it smaller by removing QEMU/ollama, but the problem is I don’t even have the sources or commands I did anymore. It was compiled without scripts manually, so I don’t have commands that I executed, and the DTS and other config files which I modified did not save.

[Nguyen_Thi_Hue]

thank you so much. i want to test it on my board. one question : which config files did you select. i used to search for the information on the sdk which had not success; when come to install package manager ( like apk; some wireguard feature on build root and some related library . it fail to compile)

[BoryaGames]

I used most of the Fishwaldo’s debian (configs/duos/) defconfigs, but also ARM-specific settings that I found at Duo Buildroot SDK V2 defconfigs (build/boards/cv181x/sg2000_milkv_duos_glibc_arm64_sd/*).
If you want specific config file, you can extract it from the image.

[Nguyen_Thi_Hue]

ya; i will looking for that later. here is the google drive link of your image : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GNwNm96yek8VjdWQqbti9qm9rHy1NBW1/view?usp=sharing . in case someone need

[gooblet234]

Thank you so much. I literally cannot thank you enough, Nguyen_Thi_Hue. You saved me 8 hours of waiting!

[gooblet234]

Do you by chance have a checksum or hash of the original image?

[BoryaGames]

MD5: f3d52feea7940822ca5471440e860447
SHA1: d74dfd98c822e8162bc0fda48c86625c6cac56af
SHA256: cd445b505cf5a688985da7f62ebc5a1e71b4c8c2dc4a09cbb9c730e6b76081ae

[BoryaGames]

Hello, everyone! While the WSL installation where everything was compiled was deleted and I’m not able to easily “just make a new image”, I’m still able to patch the existing one.
I recently learned some things about KVM acceleration and decided to add KVM support to this image.
When I was making this image, I did try to enable KVM at first and saw it wasn’t working, so I disabled and forgot about it.

Yesterday I managed to recompile and swap the kernel in the image, enabling KVM support:

As expected, KVM didn’t work this time either.

But this time I was more prepared and learned about ARM’s exception levels (EL1, EL2…) and after some struggle with patching and recompiling U-Boot without having a known good defconfig and making a new one, I managed to do it:

After a new bootloader, this time KVM got initialized successfully.

While I’m still experimenting with KVM’s capabilities and didn’t do anything impressive with it for now, I’ll still release the patched image to the public:

Download from MEGA [6.99 GB]

MD5: 697d5820406fde462dd500773bb1632a
SHA1: a50fe7bd51eeb6ef3b0790b9f4260e8167ff93b5
SHA256: 1dcd9b59fba24375a7b26e0683aa3b2e8c126f7b76fd017bdeee3a1fa775f896

I think it will be cool having a tiny ARM64 device with KVM support, that should be able run QEMU a lot faster, than a normal x86-based PC, even if it’s more powerful, since basic TCG acceleration is so slow. I’m thinking about trying Windows 11 on ARM or something else later, but it might be an issue with this SBC having only 512 MB of RAM and there isn’t something more lightweight like Windows 7, since it doesn’t have any ARM64 builds. Maybe it will allow to run Docker or something too.

Let me know if you tested KVM and if you’ve found a useful usecase for it

[BoryaGames]

And yep, I noticed later, that new image with KVM is not much better - Wi-Fi doesn’t work, KVM doesn’t want to work with QEMU.
Oh well, I just started working on a new image then: Debian 13 (Trixie) for ARM64, but on mainline kernel 7.1.0-rc2, already got it to boot, Wi-Fi and USB RNDIS work fine.