Sipeed M1S : Linux

In my initial post on the M1S dock I described my first look at the M1S after I received it on 22DEC22.  It includes lots of hardware functionality and a good set of demo programs are described in the "Getting Started" tutorial.  I am more interested in its capability to run linux than as a platform to develop applications so I continued to go through the excellent tutorial to find out more.

For these tests we are using the static RAM rather than an SD card.  Instead of using an external tool to create an SD card we need to use Bouffalo DevCube software to burn firmware to PSRAM so that it can be used by the C906 and E907 cores.  

The "Getting Started" tutorial provides a sample Linux image and shows you how to use DevCube to burn  it to the M1S as Linux firmware.  There is also a Sipeed github site containing the SDK (Software Development Kit) so that you can build Linux yourself.  Unfortunately the image I built didn't work properly so I used the sample Linux image instead.  I successfully burned the image to SRAM and it booted straightaway.  The (readonly) rootfs is only 2MB and there is some temporary storage available, so it is a very basic system.  It does boot extremely quickly and has the basic linux functions.

I put the M1S into a case which came as part of the package, it all fits very nicely into a compact box which is very convenient to use.  I also soldered headers onto an M1S so that one of my three boards has GPIO pins available to attach sensors and other peripherals if necessary.

The M1S package also contains a JTAG debugger which plugs into the SD card holder.  Usage is explained in the tutorial but it is a bit advanced for me so I will leave it for the moment.

As a postcript, I checked my work to build a linux kernel and noticed that there is patch folder in the github SDK tree.  Investigating further I see there is a script on github:

I ran this script, rebuilt the software, and magically I have my own linux system that I can modify at will 😊

Conclusion

Thanks to a great Sipeed "Getting Started" document I now have a basic Linux system on my Sipeed M1S SBC.  Overall I have demonstrated lots of capabilities for the board but I probably need some assistance to do more useful things.  Since the board has only been available for a month I may have to wait for people to try things out and explain what they have done.  Regardless, it is a great project which Wu Casear has set in motion.