FreeBSD on StarFive VisionFive 2

I'm working on getting FreeBSD running nicely on the StarFive VisionFive 2, a nice RISC-V board recently released. I'll be dropping scripts, notes, programs and anything else relevant in this repo until I get beyond early experiments.

Latest progress (2023-01-07): booting 14.0-SNAPSHOT 2023-01-01. No drivers for anything yet.

Getting started

Get your board running on the provided Linux image first. This makes sure your board actually works, and you can flash an SD card.

Make sure you set up the serial port according to the docs. FreeBSD has no driver support for anything on this board yet, so the serial console will be your only window to the world.

Create an image

Run mkvf2img.sh. This will produce vf2.img, a complete FreeBSD 14.0-SNAPSHOT 2023-01-01 base image with everything needed to boot on the VF2 and run from memory (necessary, since we have no device drivers yet). Flash it to an SD card.

Boot the FreeBSD loader

Insert the SD card, and power up. On the serial console, when it gets to Hit any key to stop autoboot:, hit a key to get to the StarFive # prompt. Then enter the following commands to setup and boot the FreeBSD loader:

fatload mmc 1:1 ${fdt_addr_r} dtb/starfive/jh7110-starfive-visionfive-2-v1.3b.dtb
fatload mmc 1:1 ${kernel_addr_r} efi/boot/bootriscv64.efi
bootefi ${kernel_addr_r} ${fdt_addr_r}

Load the root filesystem and boot the system

When you see the Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt, hit a key to get to the OK prompt. The enter the following commands to load the root filesystem and boot the system:

load geom_uzip
load -t md_image /root.img.uzip
set vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0.uzip" # this may optimized by modify /boot/loader.conf
set vfs.root.mountfrom.options="rw"
boot -v

Notes:

• root.img.uzip is large, and will take a while to load (over 10 minutes)
• If you want to drop straight into the kernel debugger as soon as possible to trace hardware probing, replace the last step with boot -d (-v is verbose, which is often useful)

Note the uzip extension, not a zip extension, and take your time typing this; the mountroot prompt doesn't have working terminal control, so backspacing or using arrow keys will mess up the entry.

Watch the kernel messages fly by, until finally:

FreeBSD/riscv (generic) (rcons)

login: 

Login with username root, password root. Enjoy!