Heads up! Lichee Pi 4A vs VisionFive 2 vs HiFive Unmatched vs Raspberry Pi 4B

I have a lot of RISC-V and Arm hardware. How do my latest 3 RISC-V purchases stand up against each other and the stalwart Raspberry Pi 4B? Let’s find out!

The similarities between these boards are striking. All have 4 cores and all except the HiFive board have 8GB of RAM (HiFive Unmatched has 16GB). All have some kind of flash-based storage: The Raspberry Pi and Sipeed Lichee are using external SanDisk SSDs connected by USB 3. The HiFive Unmatched and VisionFive 2 have NVMe drives (I hope all SBCs provide an NVMe slot going forward).

Since I mainly use these for compiling Fedora packages, I tested compiling qemu using identical configurations. I built it a few times to warm up and then timed the last build, on otherwise unloaded machines. Here are the results:

	Release date	Cost (see note)	qemu build (secs)
HiFive Unmatched (RISC-V)	2020	£1000+	3642
Vision Five 2 (RISC-V)	2022/3	£150	582
Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A (RISC-V)	2023	£200	1376*
Raspberry Pi 4B (Arm)	2019	£238	1154

Note that in the cost column I have included tax, delivery, and all extras that I had to purchase (such as disks) to bring the device up to the tested configuration. This is why the prices are much higher than the sticker price you will see online. Also the Raspberry Pi price is what I paid back in the halcyon days of 2020 before Raspberry Pi shortages.

* The speed test for the Sipeed Lichee was done using the Fedora distribution. There seems to be something very wrong with the measured speed of this board, and given the TH1520 chip we think this board ought to be able to do much better. However restoring the original Debian distro to it will require a load more work, because the boot path for this board is insane.

If you would like to try to reproduce these numbers, first download this config file (benchconfig.sh). Then check out qemu sources @ commit 885fc169f09f591 (don’t forget the submodules). Then do:

mkdir build
cd build
../benchconfig.sh
make clean
time make -j4

This should compile about 2576 targets (the number can vary depending on the precise stuff you have installed, it’s hard to make qemu configurations completely identical, but it shouldn’t be much larger or smaller than this).

Raspberry Pi 4 running Fedora 32

I got Fedora 32 installed on an RPi 4 8GB, booting off USB, with UEFI and ACPI. I followed Robert Grimm’s instructions here, and had an additional set of complications summarised here. There’s not much to say except that it was fiendishly complicated. But it works beautifully now, and is reasonably quick too especially when you consider how little it cost.

So let’s talk about costs (all include tax and delivery):

Raspberry Pi 4 8GB	£77.33
Case	£10.99
SanDisk 500GB SSD x 2	£149.98
small SD card needed for booting	£free

Only one of the SSDs is actually used, but if you follow Robert’s instructions you will need two. I didn’t have any external USB SSDs that were both USB 3 and not spinning hard disks, so I had to buy these, but I’ll be able to reuse one in a future project. The SD card is required to work around a bug in the UEFI firmware, but I happened to have one lying around.

make -j46 kernel builds on Qualcomm Amberwing

Really nice doing make -j46 kernel builds on Qualcomm’s insanely fast ARM-based Amberwing server.

AMD Seattle LeMaker Cello

I was a bit optimistic when I said:

the LeMaker Cello is available for preorder with delivery next month.

back in March 2016 (sic).

But hey, better late than never.

AMD seem to have decided to give up on ARM, making this board now only a historical curiosity. And look at that heatsink! I suspect these early chips have cooling problems.

Fedora on the Pine64

Well getting Fedora running on the Pine64 has been an adventure. Fedora itself doesn’t work out of the box, but that’s to be expected because we’re waiting for some things to go upstream. But thanks to the tireless efforts of the Linux SunXi project I was able to boot the board with a (mostly) open source firmware, self-compiled near-upstream kernel, and a Fedora filesystem.

rjones@pine:~$ uname -a
Linux pine 4.9.0-00036-ge6af24d #14 SMP PREEMPT Sat Mar 18 13:56:36 GMT 2017 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
rjones@pine:~$ cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 25 (Twenty Five)

Below I will describe how to do this, but note that by the time Fedora 26 comes out you should not need to do any of this stuff.

---

Cross-compile your own kernel as described here. As well as the standard defconfig you will also need to enable CONFIG_XFS_FS=y.

Run make dtbs to create arch/arm64/boot/dts/allwinner/sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dtb which you will need later.

Read about the AllWinner A64/Pine64 boot process. It’s not necessary to replicate those steps exactly, but it helps to explain why we’re doing the next steps.

Grab one of the firmware images from here (it doesn’t matter which) and write it to your micro SD card. But note this firmware and dtb is out of date, and so you must then get the latest firmware from here and overwrite it:

# dd if=pine64_firmware-20170314.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=8k seek=1

The firmware image above will create a single 100 MB FAT partition. Add further partitions to the partition table on the micro SD card so it looks approximately like this. The root filesystem must be on partition 5 (the first logical partition).

Device         Boot    Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1          2048   204799   202752   99M  6 FAT16
/dev/mmcblk0p2        204800 31116287 30911488 14.8G  5 Extended
/dev/mmcblk0p5        206848 21178367 20971520   10G 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p6      21180416 25374719  4194304    2G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Make swap on /dev/mmcblk0p6.

From your kernel build, copy arch/arm64/boot/Image and arch/arm64/boot/dts/allwinner/sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dtb to the first (FAT) partition. (This will overwrite the existing out of date dtb file.)

Extract the filesystem from a virt-builder Fedora 25 aarch64 image:

$ virt-builder --arch aarch64 fedora-25
$ virt-filesystems -a fedora-25.img --all --long -h
$ guestfish --ro -a fedora-25.img run : download /dev/sda4 aarch64-root.fs

This is an XFS filesystem image, which is why you have to enable the XFS driver in the custom kernel above.

Now write this to the fifth (first logical) partition:

# dd if=aarch64-root.fs of=/dev/mmcblk0p5 bs=16M
# xfs_growfs /dev/mmcblk0p5

You will now need to mount up the root filesystem and make a few changes. At the very least:

1. Edit /etc/fstab to reflect reality.
2. Disable the root password in /etc/passwd.

With any luck booting the micro SD card in the Pine64 should now work.

Pine64 — extra things

e64As with other low end ARM hardware the $50 I paid for the Pine64 isn’t enough for a fully working system. You will also need a serial port adapter, I recommend the CP2102 of which you’ll find millions on Amazon for under £10. Also, a micro SD card. And a USB to micro USB cable to power the board.

The total cost of this shouldn’t be more than another $40, taking the total cost of the hardware to about $90.

Pine64 — delivered

A few weeks ago you will remember that I ordered a Pine64 aarch64 developer kit with the wifi daughter-card, in order to test how well it works with upstream Fedora. It arrived today. The ordering process was very efficient with Pine64 keeping me up to date at all steps along the way, and there were no customs delays or charges.

As I’m rather busy in the next few days, I may not have time to look at it right away.

Pine64 – ordered

I ordered the 2 GB Pine64 64 bit ARM board. It’s extremely constrained compared to the normal 64 bit ARM boards I use, but it’s good that there’s one which may be supported by upstream Linux in the near future.

Total cost for the board + the wifi accessory + postage to the UK is $50.98 (£42.36).

Let’s see how it goes …

---

They also have this strange SO-DIMM form-factor co-processor. I’m not sure what to make of it.

Gigabyte Cavium ARM servers

http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/list.aspx?s=92&p=190&v=1029&ck=102

Gigabyte just announced a bunch of full ARM servers, with between 32 and 96 cores. They are based around the Cavium ThunderX processors that we’ve had at Red Hat for a while so they should run RHEL either out of the box or very soon after release.

Another bit of ARM server hardware: SoftIron Overdrive

https://shop.softiron.co.uk/product/overdrive-1000/

The data sheet is here but in brief, quad core AMD Seattle with 8 GB of RAM (expandable to 64 GB). Approximately equivalent to the still missing AMD Cello developer board.