StarFive VisionFive 2 Official Debian SSD Boot Guide

The StarFive VisionFive 2 comes with a M.2 M-key PCIe 2.0 slot that we can use with a 2280 NVMe drive. Unfortunately at release it’s not possible to boot from the NVMe drive but this is expected to be added to the device through some combination of SPI+NVMe booting.

In the meantime we are going to bootstrap the boot process using a SD card and then clone that SD card to our SSD to be used as the root partition. This essentially will let us have our system’s root partition on the SSD (much faster).

Let’s get started!

Hardware Used

The StarFive VisionFive 2 is a quad-core high performance single board computer that runs the RISC-V open-hardware architecture. It also has a dedicated GPU making it suitable for desktop use!

Links: Amazon.com*, AliExpress*

The Geekworm copper heat sink set is designed to fit many different single board computers. It uses thermal conductive adhesive which many “cheap” heat sink kits for SBCs don’t have. Eliminates hot spots and reduces throttling. Can be further enhanced by powered cooling over the heat sinks.

Links: Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.it*

Preparing SSD

First we are going to completely remove all partitions from the drive so it’s completely blank. Your drive should typically be /dev/nvme0n1:

sudo gdisk /dev/nvme0n1

Now remove all partitions from the device. If you press “p” it will print out the partitions. You can then use “d” to delete them.

Here’s an example on mine:

root@starfive:/# sudo gdisk /dev/nvme0n1
sudo: unable to resolve host starfive: Temporary failure in name resolution
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.9

Partition table scan:
  MBR: MBR only
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: not present


***************************************************************
Found invalid GPT and valid MBR; converting MBR to GPT format
in memory. THIS OPERATION IS POTENTIALLY DESTRUCTIVE! Exit by
typing 'q' if you don't want to convert your MBR partitions
to GPT format!
***************************************************************


Command (? for help): p
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB
Model: Samsung SSD 960 EVO 1TB                 
Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 8ACF6B0D-D7EC-48A0-955B-93AD7C6B53FE
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 1922993516 sectors (917.0 GiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048          264191   128.0 MiB   0700  Microsoft basic data
   2          264192        30533632   14.4 GiB    8300  Linux filesystem

Command (? for help): d
Partition number (1-2): 1

Command (? for help): d
Using 2

Command (? for help): w

Final checks complete. About to write GPT data. THIS WILL OVERWRITE EXISTING
PARTITIONS!!

Do you want to proceed? (Y/N): y
OK; writing new GUID partition table (GPT) to /dev/nvme0n1.
The operation has completed successfully.

Keep pressing d until all the partitions are deleted. Once they are gone use the ‘w’ command to write your changes.

Cloning Installation to SSD

We’re now ready to clone your installation to the SSD. We can now copy your drive to the SSD with the following command:

cat /dev/mmcblk1 > /dev/nvme0n1

Wait for the operation to complete (there won’t be any output but you will have a cursor again and be able to type new commands). Remember that you are copying an entire drive from one to another basically with that one command.

Mine took about 30-45 minutes (although I was using a 64GB SD card and the larger SD card you use the longer it will take to copy the whole drive).

If you are having any trouble with permissions try becoming “root” first with:

su

Now try running the command again and as the superuser you should not encounter any permission errors.

Change SD card’s rootfs UUID

We need to change our SD card’s UUID so that it doesn’t try to boot from that partition. We can set it to a random one with the following command:

sudo tune2fs -U random /dev/mmcblk1p3

If you get an error with the previous command regarding csums try the following command instead:

sudo tune2fs -O metadata_csum_seed -U random /dev/mmcblk1p3

We can verify that it has changed with blkid like this:

root@starfive:/boot# sudo blkid
sudo: unable to resolve host starfive: Temporary failure in name resolution
/dev/nvme0n1p3: LABEL="root" UUID="8260c14e-8ec8-406a-ae74-4ae0465376cf" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="3d4c02eb-9c28-46a1-a86b-71666ef51cdb"
/dev/nvme0n1p2: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="49C6-F38E" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="bdc51e7d-66f3-4ba4-ac93-adf2e8850928"
/dev/mmcblk1p3: LABEL="root" UUID="2e441104-607f-4f13-ada2-09d2ef0e03fd" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="3d4c02eb-9c28-46a1-a86b-71666ef51cdb"
/dev/mmcblk1p2: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="49C6-F38E" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="bdc51e7d-66f3-4ba4-ac93-adf2e8850928"
/dev/nvme0n1p1: PARTUUID="5f7fd372-5546-44df-b018-a077758cee2f"
/dev/mmcblk1p1: PARTUUID="5f7fd372-5546-44df-b018-a077758cee2f"

Notice that /dev/nvme0n1p3 and /dev/mmcblk1p3 no longer have matching UUIDs. This is exactly what we want.

Fix extlinux.conf

Use this one-liner to update /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf:

sudo sed -i 's/mmcblk1p3/nvme0n1p3/g' /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

Run fsck

Before we reboot run fsck on the drive like this:

sudo fsck -yf /dev/nvme0n1p3

This will prevent you from having to run fsck on the CLI the first time you try to boot.

Reboot and Verify

Now reboot the VisionFive 2 with:

sudo reboot

With any luck you should be booted using your SSD! We can verify this with the mount command like this:

root@starfive:/home/user# sudo mount
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)

Here we can see that our root partition (/) is indeed on /dev/nvme0n1p3 and not /dev/mmcblk0p3. Success!

Benchmarking Performance

You can verify the performance of your drive on Pi Benchmarks using the following command:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

Here are the results:

     Category                  Test                      Result     
HDParm                    Disk Read                 181.92 MB/s              
HDParm                    Cached Disk Read          181.63 MB/s              
DD                        Disk Write                107 MB/s                 
FIO                       4k random read            44425 IOPS (177700 KB/s) 
FIO                       4k random write           9006 IOPS (36024 KB/s)   
IOZone                    4k read                   64462 KB/s               
IOZone                    4k write                  43701 KB/s               
IOZone                    4k random read            35419 KB/s               
IOZone                    4k random write           75853 KB/s               

                          Score: 13,856

The full StarFive VisionFive 2 benchmark can be viewed here on Pi Benchmarks.

This is actually a great performance score. It’s much higher than anything the Raspberry Pi 4 can do thanks to the PCIe interface (while the Raspberry Pi 4 has to use USB).

It’s also below competing ARM boards such as the Orange Pi 5, ODROID M1 and the Raspberry Pi CM4 that have PCIe 2.0 interfaces. The latest generation of alternative ARM boards are faster than this board but they also have a lot more CPU cores.

It’s pretty impressive performance considering this is RISC-V and not an ARM device. This is by far the highest score I’ve *ever* seen on any RISC-V device. It’s not even close. RISC-V is still a rapidly developing technology while ARM processors (while still having technological improvements) are unquestionably a much further developed technology. RISC-V is catching up very quickly though!