4/8 GB ram on VisionFive2

[psicro]

Hi,

I'm testing a visionfive2 board with 8GB ram and I can only see 4GB in the armbian installed system.

As far as I understand, the official image by StarFive has a extra u-boot partition on SD that tricks something to make the ram fully visible to the system.

In fact I can see 8GB when using the official debian image but only 4 under armbian.

 

Is there any way to fix this? I'd like to use the armbian environment while using the full ram available. I'm trying to mashup the two partition schemas but I'm probably doing someting wrong...

 

Thank you in advance for any (very appreciated) help!

 

-psi

[gounthar]

Where did you find the image?

Thanks.

[illwieckz]

I face the same problem, Armbian only reports 4GB on my VisionFive2 board with 8GB of RAM.

I also noticed that the system is very unstable and constantly hanging after some minutes of usage, especially when I install Debian packages with Apt.

I haven't tested the official Debian image yet. I hope it fixes both the reported RAM and that instability.

Here is the page for the official VisionFive2 Debian: https://rvspace.org/en/project/VisionFive2_Debian_Wiki_202409_Release

 

Links can be found there: https://debian.starfivetech.com/ 

[illwieckz]

I tested the upstream Debian and I only got 4GB as well, I don't know if that was stable or not. Actually some upstream Debian images I tried didn't work at all at first.

Then I upgraded the firmwares on my board, following these instructions:

https://forum.rvspace.org/t/visionfive-2-debian-image-released/994/75

 

Bu I was more precise than that, first I used the sdcard image and fimware files from 2.6.0 (said to work in that page):

https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2/releases/tag/VF2_v2.6.0

 

Note: I had no display, I ran the firmware update commands over SSH.

Then I rebooted, using the sdcard image from 2.11.5 (arbitrary chosen):

https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2/releases/tag/VF2_v2.11.5

 

But I used the latest (5.11.3) firmware files to update the firmware:

https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2/releases/tag/JH7110_VF2_515_v5.11.3

After that, I flased the latest image (202409), for sdcard: starfive-jh7110-202409-SD-minimal-desktop-wayland.img
 

The whole 8GB is displayed and everything looks stable, the board is running since 9 hours without problem. But one problem is that this Debian image is based on an now-old Debian Trixie/Sid snapshot, which is painful to deal whit.

I'll try again the Armbian image later to see if the firmware update fixed the memory size problem and the stability.