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The VF2 (original) is a stolid workhorse, as long as you only use it for simple CLI-based stuff. The hardware is very well supported by Linux. The performance
by rwmj 1y ago
The VF2 (original) is a stolid workhorse, as long as you only use it for simple CLI-based stuff. The hardware is very well supported by Linux. The performance isn't great, but I used it to fix hundreds of Fedora packages to add RISC-V support, so you can't really beat its effectiveness. You do want to get the version with the max amount of RAM, and you'll also need to add an M.2 for storage (one PCIe lane!)
- mkesper 1y agoCan you install it without a serial connection? Mine is still collecting dust...
- brucehoult 1y agoI've had a couple of original (kickstarter) VisionFive 2s for 2 1/2 years, use them constantly, and have never used a UART connection with them.
- h3lp 1y agoOn Banana Pi F3, which is similar to VF2, you can boot off SDcard, and transfer the OS to eMMC or M2.
- brucehoult 1y agoFor CLI-based programming work an SSD is unnecessary, an SD card is perfectly fine as long as it's large enough to hold all your stuff and you have enough RAM to cache the frequently-used bits. The difference will be measured in a couple of dozen seconds on an hour-long build. SD cards have the very great advantage that you can have multiple ones with different OSes or versions and swap them in seconds.
- tremon 1y agoHow long does the average SD card last in a build machine? I thought these cards only have write endurance of a few thousand cycles?
- brucehoult 1y agoYou wouldn't want to use an SD card for a full time build machine at Fedora or Canonical. It's fine for a normal user doing a few builds a day. Most files never get written to the physical device, being in tempfs or disk cache and deleted before being flushed to disk. Because of wear-levelling it's not how many times the busiest file is rewritten, but how many GB are written in total. 512GB cards currently cost $32, $35, or $40 depending on whether you want 100, 150, or 200 MB/s read speeds. A GCC src tree is 2.5GB, the build tree is 11GB. It's going to take ~40 clean builds to put one write cycle on the whole card, so you'll probably get 100,000 clean builds off a card before you wear it out. That's around 30 builds per cent.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago> Most files never get written to the physical device, being in tempfs or disk cache and deleted before being flushed to disk. It's fine if you're using tmpfs, but I would expect written files on anything else to make it to disk even if they also spend some time in the write buffer. Especially on a build box where memory pressure is higher.
- brucehoult 1y agoI buy boards with enough RAM. I usually have 10GB+ "buff/cache" on my 16GB RAM LicheePi 3A (SpacemiT K1 SoC) and Milk-V Megrez (EIC7700X P550 cores) boards which are my current "has RVV" and "faster" RISC-V boards.