Alpine Linux on BananaPi F3

[Milan P. Stanić]

Hello,

I'm pleased to announce that we (a team) at Alpine Linux
(https://alpinelinux.org) made Alpine Linux to work very well on
BananaPi F3 riscv64 board.

We made all needed things in official Alpine aports repositories:
- opensbi at https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/testing/opensbi-spacemit
- u-boot at https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/testing/u-boot-spacemit
- kernel at https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/testing/linux-spacemit

All these are based on Bianbu sources.

Alpine userspace works out-of-the-box on BPI F3 very welll.

I have written a short (and not yet complete) unofficial guide how to
install and use Alpine on this SBC here
https://arvanta.net/alpine/alpine-on-spacemit/

We are using this SBC for Alpine CI, router, wifi access point and also
for developing and improving Alpine on riscv64.

Personally I'm pleased with this SBC and SoC though have more to work to
improve Alpine (and linux kernel and userspace) support for it.

--
Kind regards

[poddingue at work]

Congratulations, that's good to know, and could work as a foundation for other projects (like mine) that build on top of Alpine.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to devboard-commun...@riscv.org.

[Milan P. Stanić]

Hi,

Sorry, I forgot to mention that we have IRC channel #alpine-riscv64 on OFTC for
discussion about development and help Alpine on riscv64

--
Kind regards

[Sungjoon Moon]

It must be useful for porting to Milk-V jupiter too.

Best regards

> On Dec 16, 2024, at 21:20, Milan P. Stanić <m...@arvanta.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,

[Milan P. Stanić]

On Mon, 2024-12-16 at 21:56, 'Sungjoon Moon' via RISC-V Developer Board Community wrote:
> It must be useful for porting to Milk-V jupiter too.

I think so, but no one of our team (Alpine) have Milk-V jupiter to test.

Someone on the #alpine-riscv64 tested it on Lichee Pi 3A and told it
works. Image I've built actually have u-boot option to boot image on
this SBC but I didn't wrote about it because we didn't tested because we
don't have this board also.

And I wildly guess it will boot on musebook with some tweaks maybe,
which we don't have to test.

--
Kind regards

[Sungjoon Moon]

I have one, I will try and update on here or IRC channel.

I also have K230 based SBCs. It can be next goal.

Best regards

> On Dec 16, 2024, at 22:32, Milan P. Stanić <m...@arvanta.net> wrote:

[Baptiste Jonglez]

Hi,

On 16-12-24, Milan P. Stanić wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm pleased to announce that we (a team) at Alpine Linux
> (https://alpinelinux.org) made Alpine Linux to work very well on
> BananaPi F3 riscv64 board.

Thanks for this work!

For cfarm [1] we used your Alpine image on a VisionFive 2, and it has
worked very well (including kernel updates). This is cfarm94 [2].

For the BPI-F3, we run Debian so far (upstream userspace but Bianbu 6.6
kernel). Are you using the same 6.6 vendor kernel? There have been some
upstream kernel patches submitted, but very little support has been merged
upstream as far as I know.

We would definitely like this board to gain upstream kernel support.
A first step will be to build a working kernel on top of the upstream
kernel with good-quality patches.

Baptiste

[1] https://portal.cfarm.net/
[2] https://portal.cfarm.net/machines/list/

[Milan P. Stanić]

Hi,

On Mon, 2024-12-16 at 14:48, Baptiste Jonglez wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 16-12-24, Milan P. Stanić wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm pleased to announce that we (a team) at Alpine Linux
> > (https://alpinelinux.org) made Alpine Linux to work very well on
> > BananaPi F3 riscv64 board.
>
> Thanks for this work!
>
> For cfarm [1] we used your Alpine image on a VisionFive 2, and it has
> worked very well (including kernel updates). This is cfarm94 [2].

This board is now works with linux-lts (Long Term Stable) kernel package
and with linux-edge (Latest Stable) kernel package. linux-starfive
kernel package still works but it will be removed or changed to work
with visionfive V1 and maybe Beagle starlight. Maybe it will still
support visionfive V2 but I'm not yet decided about this.

Also, it is possible that we will have in near future official alpine
image for VF1 based on latest alpine release 3.21-stable.

> For the BPI-F3, we run Debian so far (upstream userspace but Bianbu 6.6
> kernel). Are you using the same 6.6 vendor kernel? There have been some
> upstream kernel patches submitted, but very little support has been merged
> upstream as far as I know.

For this board we use Bianbu kernel patches which are rebased by
Natanael Copa to the one of the latest 6.6 mainline kernels.
https://github.com/ncopa/linux/commits/spacemit-6.6.53-alpine/

> We would definitely like this board to gain upstream kernel support.
> A first step will be to build a working kernel on top of the upstream
> kernel with good-quality patches.

Natanael use one of our images for this board as CI for alpine.
You can join our IRC #alpine-riscv64 channel on OFTC and ask him
directly about CI.

I experiment with few different kernels in a hope to find something
which is more easy to maintain and improve. But this is still in early
phase and I didn't uploaded results for other, though on request I could
upload if someone need it.

--
Kind regards

> Baptiste
>
> [1] https://portal.cfarm.net/
> [2] https://portal.cfarm.net/machines/list/
>