Thanks a lot for the pointers. As of now, I'm running the official Debian image. How far along is arch? Has it caught up with Debian, or even overtaken it?
Be careful that the "official Debian image" from StarFive is based on a "debian snapshot" from summer last year. I consider it more of a demo system than something to use in the real world.
Yes, the RISC-V software ecosystem has made significant progress during the last year. It has also made significant progress since VisionFive2's started shipping January, as it was the first mass-produced cheap RISC-V SBC.
I have experienced that ecosystem acceleration (it is not my first Linux-capable RISC-V hardware). Software got better really fast ever since VF2.
Userspace-wise, that Arch I linked just works. I used the debian image to unpack their root tarball and set things up via chroot.
You need to understand the standard RISC-V boot process, and particularly how to configure u-boot. I assume you have serial port access, else I recommend grabbing a cp2104 based usb to ttl serial adapter from aliexpress (~$2). It is very hard to interact with u-boot and/or debug boot issues without.
The kernel is what gets difficult. You need a kernel that supports the VisionFive 2. I did compile mine from one of the trees maintained by people in the forum.
StarFive managed to get a lot of code merged upstream[0] in a short amount of time, but you'd be missing important features such as video output if you use that.
Once more patches get upstreamed and the UEFI effort gets console support (video output and usb keyboard), boot should be as easy as any modern PC, with Linux distributions generic install media simply working outright.
