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:
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:
Uncompress it with
$ xz -d Fedora-Server-P550-41-20241214.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-P550-41-20241214.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, Fedora should come up.
The root password is linux.
The image is fairly minimal, but any additional software you might need is just a short dnf invocation away.
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 in 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.
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.
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.