Running a Low-Power RISC-V Server

Build Flashing the OS Software Woes Operating System ZFS

Build process for the Orange Pi RV2, an 8-core RISC-V development board I used to build an off-site backup NAS and mini-server. Mine came with 4GB of LPDDR4X and I paired it with 2x 2TB SATA SSDs for storage and 1x NVMe SSD for booting.

Build

The case is built around the idea of the TerraPi EVO:

TerraPi EVO Dual SSD Case for Raspberry Pi 3 & 4 by INUX3D | Download free STL model | Printables.com

The TerraPi EVO is a dual SSD case for the Raspberry Pi, that uses the 2.5″ sata SSD drives as the case, placing the Pi board between the disks. It comes only in dual SSD drive configuration.

https://www.printables.com/model/355311-terrapi-evo-dual-ssd-case-for-raspberry-pi-3-4

I removed the fan mount, re-designed the bottom plate to accommodate the OrangePi screw holes instead, and also redesigned one of the side panels to allow for better USB clearance since the OrangePi ports face the side instead of the front. Since the original design uses the CC4 license and does not allow remixes, I will not publish my design files.

The SSDs are connected via USB 3.0 SATA to USB connectors and powered via USB. The entire SBC is powered by a 5V, 5A capable USB-C PD power brick.

Flashing the OS

Flashing the OS is very straightforward. Grab your image that you want from the main page first.

OrangePi RV2

http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/service-and-support/Orange-Pi-RV2.html

Then use Rufus/Etcher/DD or any method of your choice to write this to a microSD card. According to the manual, it seems like you need to boot from SD Card for the first boot. It also needs to write the SPI Flash bootloader to configure the initial boot. Following the steps to use nand-sata-install tool works flawlessly for NVMe and eMMC options.

Then follow the instructions here:

Orange Pi RV2 - Wiki-Orange Pi

OrangePi RV2 is a cost-effective RISC-V development board that adopts a CPU integrated AI technology architecture and is equipped with an RISC-V eight core processor. It provides universal computing power with 2TOPS CPU integration and supports rapid deployment of AI model algorithms. Equipped with 2GB/4GB/8GB LPDDR4X, supporting eMMC modules (16GB/32GB/64GB/128GB optional), Wi Fi 5.0+BT 5.0, and BLE support.

http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiwiki/index.php/Orange_Pi_RV2#Method_for_burning_Linux_images_to_SPIFlash.2BNVMe_SSD

Note: only the back NVMe slot (the full 2280 slot) supports booting.

Software Woes

Operating System

Since the operating system I chose happens to be built by OrangePi, there are a few caveats that can be total security dealbreakers (!!) if you care about this. Their OS image is hosted on Huawei cloud and is also built by OrangePi. While you can use things like Armbian and DietPi with normal ARM-based SBCs, RISC-V supported and fully tested images for this board do not seem to exist (at the time of writing). I needed something quick and easy, so I went ahead and used the linked Ubuntu image from their website (that seems to be missing a security certificate…)

For now, my solution has just been to change the repo origins to not pull from Huawei cloud.


orangepi@orangepirv2:~$ sudo apt update
...
Hit:2 https://repo.huaweicloud.com/docker-ce/linux/ubuntu noble InRelease
Hit:3 http://repo.huaweicloud.com/ubuntu-ports noble InRelease
Hit:4 http://repo.huaweicloud.com/ubuntu-ports noble-security InRelease
Hit:5 http://repo.huaweicloud.com/ubuntu-ports noble-updates InRelease
Hit:6 http://repo.huaweicloud.com/ubuntu-ports noble-backports InRelease
...

ZFS

There seems to be some problems if you decide to run ZFS with your drives.

Running the following results in errors even after installing zfsutils-linux and zfs-dkms


orangepi@orangepirv2:~$ sudo modprobe zfs
modprobe: FATAL: Module zfs not found in directory /lib/modules/6.6.63-ky

There are a few additional steps to take to get this working:

Orange Pi RV2 - Wiki-Orange Pi

http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiwiki/index.php/Orange_Pi_RV2#How_to_install_kernel_header_files

Install the Kernel Header Files. They come with the OrangePi installations in /opt/


cd /opt/
ls *linux-headers*
sudo dpkg -i <name of header file>

Install zfsutils-linux and zfs-dkms . Purge these packages if you had previously installed them. This should trigger it to recompile some packages.

Reboot

You should now see zfs on your default startup message and you can now run zfs commands


Welcome to Orange Pi 1.0.0 Noble with Linux 6.6.63-ky

System load:   26%              Up time:       0 min    Local users:   3
Memory usage:  8% of 3.72G      IP:            
CPU temp:      60°C             Usage of /:    1% of 458G
ZFS pool:      n/a

orangepi@orangepirv2:~$ lsmod | grep "zfs"
zfs                 26763264  0
spl                   765952  1 zfs

orangepi@orangepirv2:~$ zfs list
no datasets available

You can now create your pools as you wish.