Bas Magré Straps a Full-Size GPU to StarFive's VisionFive 2 to Get Quake II Running in RISC-V Fedora

Developer and self-described "open-source freak" Bas Magré has been putting the freshly-launched StarFive VisionFive 2 RISC-V single-board computer through its paces — working around driver issues with its integrated GPU by connecting an external graphics card to play Id Software's Quake II.

"I wanted to compile and test a few programs on a RISC-V [single-board computer,]" Magré explains of his project. "I only ran into the problem of minimal support of the onboard GPU and custom build Debian from the StarFive Team. So [here] you can see my 'solution.'"

The board at the heart of Magré's experiments is the StarFive VisionFive 2, which crowdfunded last year as a cost-reduced more powerful follow-up to the company's original VisionFive. Unlike its predecessor, the VisionFive 2 — based on the StarFive JH7110 system-on-chip with four 64-bit RISC-V processor cores running at up to 1.5GHz — includes an on-board graphics processor, the Imagination Technologies IMG BXE-32-4, but early adopters are finding its driver support lacking.

To work around that, as well as to provide a little extra graphical grunt, Magré opted to take advantage of the exposed PCI Express lane on the underside of the VisionFive 2 — though rather than using it to host a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid-state storage device as its creators intended, he instead fitted an adapter to connect a full-size ATI (AMD) Radeon 5450 PCIe graphics card to the board.

"The longest [time] I spent trying to get a working kernel that had the ATI video card and audio over HDMI working," Magré says, working with the Fedora Linux distribution. "The 'Frankenstein' Debian-build-69 [OS image] is fun if you want to see the board working with the onboard GPU, but those drivers are really unfinished and X11 was as fast as I could see [and a] completely custom build for this GPU. (No OpenGL, OpenGL ES 3 only)."

Moving to the external GPU opens up a new level of compatibility with mature drivers, including support for OpenGL — and to prove it Magré took the source code for a Linux port of Id Software's 1997 first-person shooter Quake II and compiled it on the VisionFive 2, providing playable proof of accelerated graphics on the boards.

A full list of hardware used and instructions for setting up your own Fedora distribution with external GPU support on the VisionFive 2 is available on Magré's GitHub repository.