2nd gen RISC-V board announced by deepcomputing

[yuning_liang]

1. Update the Framework repository on your org with some information on the device, including info on the motherboard, usb outputs, etc? For example, based on my testing, HDMI output is only on the top right port? ==> full guide is coming, Friday release..

2. Update the OS images on your download server with the latest built distro images. I believe the current builds on these are from several months ago and there have been new patches from Eswin a few days ago ==> Image should already be our latest, Eswin SDK latest should be in our next release if we consider its a big release. Our source repository soon open for DIY building and patching and flashing. ==> Friday release.

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

• The guides in markdown instead of pdf
• Firmware update (for example, the fan is at full speed until custom OS is loaded, power draw on off is almost one watt)

will do the markdown version. should be easy. just a cut and paste.

for firmware update, is it uboot? or EC?

[Chironjit_Das]

I think you have some hardware issues, some of which may be related to the EC.

1. No easy way to shut down. The start button does not shut down the motherboard when held. I have to disconnect the power supply to get it to turn off. The OS also doesn’t seem to be able to do this correctly.
2. Full ramp up of processor and fan on start. Power consumption is at full bore (25 - 32w) during the whole time the motherboard is turned on.
3. I haven’t been able to run any of the desktop environment without it freezing so far
4. Can usb boot via a thumbdrive but not the SD card (edit: i meant i can’t boot from the SD card when its plugged in via USB. It can boot from the internal SD card slot).
5. USB peripheral detection from the OS is very unreliable (sometimes it detects it, sometimes it doesn’t)

Some good stuff:

• Pre-boot menu is great, especially options such as reset, usb (usb start/tree/etc), usbboot, etc. I hope you can document all the options you make available in the repository because its very helpful. I’m sure there are other stuff in here that will help with settings
• Graphics output via HDMI / DP protocol has been thankfully really solid (tried 4k monitor and 2k portable monitor)

At this point, since your EC is not open source, nor is there a guide for me to compile based on DC’s own kernel version, I can’t say for sure which problem is caused by which.

I would urge DC to open source its EC, as well as have a guide for compiling custom images for this board. For example, Fedora has a RISCV build system for server/container images. I can run these images on the emulator but not on the motherboard.

Also, once available, it would be nice to have the Ubuntu image here, like the one for the Motherboard I.

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

Also, once available, it would be nice to have the Ubuntu image here, like the one for the Motherboard I.

Yes, should be soon. Canonical is working on it. see our latest talk in Ubuntu Summit

Ubuntu Summit 25.10 | Day Two

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

No easy way to shut down. The start button does not shut down the motherboard when held. I have to disconnect the power supply to get it to turn off. The OS also doesn’t seem to be able to do this correctly.

should not be, is it in sleep mode? can you post a short video if you reproduce it. OS shutdown and power cycle is one of our biggest manufacturing testing.

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

Full ramp up of processor and fan on start. Power consumption is at full bore (25 - 32w) during the whole time the motherboard is turned on.

the SoC consistently running on 60+ degree most of its time, for best D2D communication between two chiplets. thats why the fan going crazy. lol. you can consider this is SoC designed bug on Chiplets.

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

Can usb boot via a thumbdrive but not the SD card (edit: i meant i can’t boot from the SD card when its plugged in via USB. It can boot from the internal SD card slot).

SoC designed in a way cannot boot from USB for some reason, we been asking them for a while.

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

USB peripheral detection from the OS is very unreliable (sometimes it detects it, sometimes it doesn’t)

can you let us know what USB device not detected or detected intermittently.

[Shiroudan]

@yuning_liang

Yes, should be soon. Canonical is working on it. see our latest talk in Ubuntu Summit

Very nice talk, I enjoyed it! Will look into contributing.

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

At this point, since your EC is not open source, nor is there a guide for me to compile based on DC’s own kernel version, I can’t say for sure which problem is caused by which.

its coming. lol.

[yuning_liang]

@Shiroudan

I enjoyed it! Will look into contributing.

Yes, please order one, and do some software contribution on community projects like VLC, AOSP, then we can rebate the cost of the laptop or mainboard.

[Chironjit_Das]

Thank you for the response and for sharing your talk. I’m not a low-level / embedded dev and so its been eye opening learning to get the board working correctly. I’m generally not a keen enthusiast on SBCs, and my only real experience of it is watching Jeff Geerling’s videos on these.

I’ve spent the past few days trying to get this working in a usable manner with the available images, and I have not yet managed to do so. I thought it might have been a hardware issue but I can run it with a custom ubuntu server image available on Eswin’s site, so i know its basically a kernel / driver issue.

My view is that this is an SBC in a different form factor. This is not necessarily a bad thing(wouldn’t have bought this otherwise). I think Deep Computing has to go further in being open about its software stack if it wants this to succeed.

From my digging into this a little more, I think Eswin already makes much of this open source from their side and most of your stack is built from open source software anyway (CrOS EC, OpenSBI + Uboot boot manager, Linux, open source ai models)

My ask from you and your team is to:

1. Provide or point to the source of your compilation for your EC and your hybrid openSBI / uboot boot manager
2. Provide steps to how you compiled the images of the SBI and OS (did you use Yocto, buildroot? what are the recipes and which kernel do we use? how did you compile your dts? Did eswin provide it or do we use one of eswin’s ones from the d560 range?)
3. Provide more information on the hardware used (schematics, etc), as well as guides on how to flash / update these.

Lastly, can i reach out to you / your team on questions if i have them? My goal is to ultimately build and run apps on top of riscv but happy to learn and contribute back to your repository if i learn something new

ps. For anyone trying to boot off a USB drive, you’ll need to load the uboot.var file into memory from the uboot menu and get that to load the riscv efi file

[yuning_liang]

It should just work out of the box as Jeff did.

The SoC is very complicated and U-Boot and Linux SDK will be open source and people can try to build images themselves.

There are binary images from our GitHub sides please follow this guide.

Feel free to email our support at

Support@deepcomputing.io

FML13V03/DC-ROMA%20RISC-V%20Mainboard%20II%20AI%20Model%20User%20Guide%20(Ubuntu%20AI%20Image).md

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

From my digging into this a little more, I think Eswin already makes much of this open source from their side and most of your stack is built from open source software anyway (CrOS EC, OpenSBI + Uboot boot manager, Linux, open source ai models)

not really.

[yuning_liang]

@Chironjit_Das

Lastly, can i reach out to you / your team on questions if i have them? My goal is to ultimately build and run apps on top of riscv but happy to learn and contribute back to your repository if i learn something new

definitely, you can get some rebate on the next gen RISCV hardware as well by contributing…

like Matt done in RISCV summit

README.md

[geerlingguy]

Edit: Oops! Posted this message in the wrong thread, moved to RP2350 based GPIO expansion card - #39 by geerlingguy instead.

[Dima_Tisnek]

So 2nd gen is V3?

Talk about confusing!

[yuning_liang]

No relation of 2nd and V03

[Tom1]

My new toy arrived today! Unfortunately things are quite busy at work so I probably won’t be able to start playing with it for another week or two but I’m looking forward to putting NixOS on this thing.

Edit: Unfortunately, mine is having issues. If I open the top of the case, and plug it into my dock then two red lights start flashing. If I then hit the power button, the fan spins up but no video goes out to my monitor.

If I merely place the translucent plastic top back on the case, not even re-attaching any screws, and plug it into my dock then no lights turn on at all, the power button does nothing, and no fans spin up.

I’ve e-mailed their support

[yuning_liang]

Did you get it to work please ? If not ping me.