VisonFive 2 Lite

Purchase

Back in August I was seduced by an advert for the VisionFive 2 Lite.  Previously I purchased the VisionFive 2, which was, in my opinion the first properly useable RISC-V SBC.  The new offering has a similar spec but is priced much more reasonably.  It is in the same price range, but not quite so powerful as a RPI3 or RPI4.  I definitely wanted one to try out and, hopefully, to put it to use.  

Initial setup

The board arrived in November so I wanted to set it up asap.  Installation is very straightforward.  An Ubuntu desktop image can be downloaded from rvspace.org and copied to an SD card using win32diskimager.
I attached a screen for first boot, the system came up very slowly to show the GUI console.  I changed the configuration to stop the GUI loading which speeds the system somewhat.  I also enabled root SSH login so that I can comfortably run a headless server here on it.

I was able to run apt upgrade to bring software up to date without problems.  Initially I installed lighttpd, nano and samba, which all work seamlessly.

RISC-V packages are not available for all software, for example I couldn't install vncserver.  However I did install xrdp which I could use instead if I want a GUI.

Comparison with VF2

The rvspace website doesn't really distinguish between VF2 and VF2L OS software. I was able to take the SD card from VF2L, insert it in VF2 and it booted fine.  The boards seem to have similar performance, the main difference is that the newer one is cheaper.

Assembler

Of course the main feature of a riscv64 computer is its assembly instruction set so it would be remiss of me to not to check whether it is easy to write assembly programs.  Modern day hero Bruce Hoult is a RISC-V evangelist and provides some simple instructions.

I installed gcc as suggested, copied the program into hello.S and I was immediately up and running with assembler.☺☺☺

Docker

I noticed that docker is already installed on VF2L, which is great.
I tried the docker hello world example and it works fine.☺☺☺

Conclusion

VF2L is a good product, perhaps comparable with a Raspberry Pi Zero W.  It will be interesting to see what software it will run.  As the RISC-V universe grows more software will be adapted / available to run.

I think I will aim to setup standard linux packages to run on it with an emphasis on using docker where possible.