Latest Ubuntu 24.04 and latest Debian testing, build with easy to use Armbian build framework:
Build from source:
./compile.sh build \
BOARD=bananapif3 \
BRANCH=legacy \
BUILD_DESKTOP=no \
BUILD_MINIMAL=yes \
DOCKER_ARMBIAN_BASE_IMAGE=ubuntu:noble \
EXPERT=yes \
KERNEL_CONFIGURE=no \
RELEASE=sid
Enjoy!
Hi community! My first post, after getting my BPI-F3 up and running with the Armbian image that was linked from the BPI-F3 getting started page.
Quite a lot seems to be working very nicely indeed. I installed linux-perf with apt and that seems to work fine too.
I’m posting though because I’m stuck at the hurdle of generating code that uses the vector instructions that are a key part of this beastie. The image seems to have come with a full gcc-13 toolchain, which I expected, but the compiler doesn’t appear to have anything resembling k1 or x60 in its -mcpu or -march support, and without extra command line switches the autovectorizer appears not to believe that there are vectors here: it just generates scalar fmac instructions. One stackoverflow answer I found suggested using -mrvv, but that wasn’t recognized. The gcc RISC-V options page RISC-V Options (Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)) appears to suggest that -march=rv64gcv1p0zvl256b might help, and that certainly doesn’t cause the compiler to complain, but it also still fails to vectorize the most trivial of loops that both clang and gcc do a good job of on arm and amd64.
Any hints or suggestions?
FWIW the code that I’m trying to vectorize is:
void saxpy(float a, float *restrict x, float *restrict y, long count)
{
long i;
x = __builtin_assume_aligned(x, 16);
y = __builtin_assume_aligned(y, 16);
for (i = 0; i < count; i++) {
y[i] = y[i] + a * x[i];
}
}
You can use -O3 -march=rv64gcv_zvl256b, but beware of 115789 – gcc miscompile itself with CFLAGS -O3 -march=rv64gcv_zvl256b
If you feel like tinkering a little you can replace the rootfs with a Gentoo stage3 and have an easier access to more recent compilers.
Thanks Luca! That Compiler Explorer link was the key I needed: gcc-14 does nice rv64v vectorization, while the Armbian-default gcc-13 doesn’t. For a working set that fits in the 32k L1 cache I get a speed-up of about 4.2 with that simple saxpy loop (rather than the eight one might expect from the vector length) so I suspect that there’s still a memory or instruction bottleneck, but it’s a good start!
Also: thanks for the warning. It’s been a while since I was tracking compiler bug-fixes in real time, but the rvv v1.0 hardware is still very new.
Armbian build framework is able to compile each source with different compiler. Shouldn’t be difficult to switch. If compiler is preinstalled, I think this is all you need to do: KERNEL_USE_GCC=‘> 13.0’. I will check into if this can be defaulted.
At least few of the packages bianbu distributes are incompatible with gcc-14 (since it refuses to build faulty code), so possibly more packages will have to be updated in order to move to gcc-14.
if you want to profile with perf keep in mind that there is a little pitfall and you should use the custom events provided with the kernel sources ^^;
Debian Sid and Ubuntu Noble minimal images were released.
Does it have onboard Wifi support? On initial setup it ask for wireless connection but return empty SSID list.
ip address show that wlan is here:
7: wlan0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN group default qlen 1000
link/ether c0:4b:24:36:6c:cd brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
But if I install network-manager it show empty Wifi list BTW, on installed armbian-config it doesn’t show Wifi on the network section. Looks like wifi drivers are not installed
UPD: Managed to get it working. This solution helped me Orange Pi 3 LTS - No WIFI - Page 2 - Allwinner sunxi - Armbian Community Forums
That works with 1st class wireless devices.
I am glad you made it.
