Nathan Campos

After waiting a couple of months since backing the project on Kickstarter [1], I
finally have in my hands yet another attempt at a budget RISC-V single board
computer.

My first dance with RISC-V came when the MangoPi MQ-Pro [2] was released back in
2022. Having a first taste of RISC-V for around $20 was simply too good to be
true. After receiving it and realizing I had to flash a random .img from a Baidu
or Yandex Drive folder, and the random crashes due to the FENCE.TSO instruction
not being implemented [3], the whole experience left me with a very bad
impression of the architecture.

Fast forward 3 years, and I'm once again trying out a budget RISC-V board, but I
thought, since the Kickstarter went so well, that this time the experience would
be a lot better, since the company had to please 436 backers.


Finding the right image
-----------------------

Upon receiving my board, I immediately bought a 128GB M.2 2242 NVMe drive, since
I wanted to give it the best possible chance at reaching peak performance. I
went to the Kickstarter page to find where I could get the images for the SSD,
and in their post on the topic of images [4], they pointed everyone to a GitHub
releases page where they keep their Debian and Ubuntu releases.

At first, I was wrongfully led by their Kickstarter post to the
JH7110_VF2_6.12_v6.0.0 image [5] thinking it was Debian. I flashed it to my SSD,
and it never booted to a shell. I still don't know what that image is supposed
to be.

After digging around their website for a while, I finally found their Debian
releases page [6], which had an interesting note about them using a snapshot
from 2023-06-12 of the Debian bookworm (then unstable) APT repositories, this
left me a bit nervous about the rest of the image, although I simply ignored it.

After flashing the proper Debian image for my VisionFive 2 Lite, I had it
booting to a Gnome desktop, that's when things got very frustrating...


The performance surprise
------------------------

While I was doing all of this, I was also chatting on #deadnet (Libera.Chat)
about the RISC-V board, and bsandro, who has the VisionFive 2 (non-Lite) board
with the same CPU, pointed out that it was "slow":

<bsandro> nathanpc: oh cool! i'm still rocking this irssi from regular vf2
<nathanpc> nice!
<nathanpc> since it's the same CPU the performance will be the same
<nathanpc> how is it?
<bsandro> slow :D
<nathanpc> lol
<nathanpc> that's how I like it :P

At this point, I thought I liked slow computers, but I was surprised when the
SBC booted into Gnome. The performance was abysmal, everything felt super clunky
and slow, opening applications felt like a monumental task, and all animations
in the UI dropped most of their frames.

I thought that all of these issues were due to the fact that I was running
Gnome, which I despise for their decisions that are hostile towards power users
of Linux, and also because it's a resource hog, so I installed my trusty IceWM
to feel how much better it would run.

Upon switching to IceWM I immediately noticed that updating the screen caused
visual glitches on the changed region, and that it was noticeably more clunky
and slower than Gnome, something I never thought was possible until now. I guess
all of these issues are due to IceWM using X11 and the GPU drivers for the
JH7110 being targeted towards Wayland, but still, the performance was on par
with the first Raspberry Pi, in my opinion.


Final thoughts
--------------

After not being able to get anything done with the desktop, not even customizing
its look, I got so frustrated that I simply shut the thing down. I don't know
what I was expecting, it's a quad-core CPU, so I figured it would be a little
bit more performant, but the slowness in the UI is simply too infuriating for me
to deal with and have fun.

For now, I'll be shelving the VisionFive 2 Lite for a while, at least until the
disappointment dissipates, and maybe more up-to-date versions of Debian get
released for it. I had this vision (no pun intended) of having some fun with it
as a desktop, and seeing how I could live with a RISC-V computer, but it's just
so slow that I can't even try it right now.

I guess I could try a lightweight Wayland compositor to see if things are a bit
better, but for now, I do believe this board is only good as a headless server.
Hopefully, my mind may change when I decide to play around with it more in the
future, but for now, it'll be relegated to the box of single board computers.


[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2-lite-unlock-risc-v-sbc-at-199
[2]: https://mangopi.org/mangopi_mqpro
[3]: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/50090
[4]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2-lite-unlock-risc-v-sbc-at-199/posts/4552688
[5]: https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2/releases/tag/JH7110_VF2_6.12_v6.0.0
[6]: https://github.com/starfive-tech/Debian/releases