Architectures/RISC-V/HiFive-Premier-P550

Warning
The image used in this guide is an unofficial one, even by the usual standard of the Fedora/RISC-V effort.

This page explains how to get Fedora running on the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 board.

Requirements

You need to have upgraded the board's firmware ("bootchain") to the latest release. At the time of writing, that would be:

• 2024.11.00-HFP550

Follow the official documentation for the process; it basically boils down to copying a single file to an ext4-formatted USB stick and running a few commands at the u-boot prompt.

Fedora won't boot if you skip this step.

Installing

Download the disk image:

• Fedora-Server-Minimal-P550-41.20250108.riscv64.raw.xz

Uncompress it with

$ xz -d Fedora-Server-Minimal-P550-41.20250108.riscv64.raw.xz

then use dd or whatever tool you're comfortable with to write it to the target media, for example:

$ sudo dd iflag=fullblock oflag=direct status=progress bs=4M if=Fedora-Server-Minimal-P550-41.20250108.riscv64.raw of=/dev/sdb

The command above assumes that you're writing the image to a microSD card connected to your computer via a USB card reader. Adjust as needed, making sure that you're targeting the correct media.

Booting

Pop the prepared media into the board and power it on. After a brief wait, you will be presented with the initial-setup screen, where you can set up the root password as well as a few other things (hostname, timezone).

The image is fairly minimal, but any additional software you might need is just a short dnf invocation away.

Software quirks

The image uses Jason Montleon's build of the 6.6-based vendor kernel. The configuration should be close to that of a regular Fedora kernel, but obviously the base is significantly older than current mainline and several downstream changes are included.

The board's DTB is passed to the kernel via GRUB2 (see GRUB_DEFAULT_DTB in /etc/default/grub) instead of being automatically loaded off the /boot filesystem. Once we have a Fedora build of the firmware ("bootchain") we'll be able to drop this hack.

GRUB2 is configured not to display its menu on boot. For whatever reason, the bootloader takes forever to draw its UI on the serial console, so hiding the menu is an effective way to avoid adding a significant delay to each boot. If you need to interact with GRUB2, just press ESC while the countdown is being displayed. Note that the countdown message could be somewhat hard to spot as it might overlap with previous serial output. Just pay attention to where the cursor is and you'll figure it out.

Hardware quirks

NVMe

The board doesn't have a native NVMe slot, but it's still possible to install an NVMe drive by plugging an adapter such as this one into the PCIe slot.

Getting the firmware to boot off NVMe requires a small configuration change. At the u-boot prompt, run the following commands:

=> env default -f -a
## Resetting to default environment
=> env print boot_targets
boot_targets=mmc1 usb sata mmc0
=> env set boot_targets "mmc1 usb nvme0 sata mmc0"
=> env print boot_targets                    
boot_targets=mmc1 usb nvme0 sata mmc0
=> env save
Saving Environment to SPIFlash... Erasing SPI flash...Writing to SPI flash...done
OK

From the next time the board is powered on, the NVMe drive will be the preferred internal boot media.

Serial console access

The board exposes several serial consoles over the USB-C port, and you need to make sure you're connected to the right one.

You can create a configuration file for minicom like so:

$ cat <<EOF >~/.minirc.p550
pu port             /dev/serial/by-id/usb-FTDI_Quad_RS232-HS-if02-port0
pu baudrate         115200
pu bits             8
pu parity           N
pu stopbits         1
pu rtscts           No
EOF

Once you've done that, you will be able to connect to the main serial console using

$ minicom p550

Fan noise

The CPU fan that comes with the board is quite loud and by default it runs at full speed, resulting in an uncomfortable amount of noise being produced. To mitigate this issue, you can configure the fan so that it runs at a much lower speed, reducing the noise significantly.

This can be easily achieved by creating a custom systemd unit:

$ cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/custom-fan-speed.service
[Unit]
Description=Set custom fan speed

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c 'echo 20 >/sys/devices/platform/soc/50b50000.fan_control/hwmon/hwmon*/pwm1'

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

and enabling it:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable --now custom-fan-speed.service

The next time the machine is powered on, the fan will run at full speed for a few seconds before slowing down.