Disclaimer

Support for the HiFive Premier P550 is still under development. The images available here just represent my personal endeavours getting the board running.

They are not supported in any way by Canonical.
They are expected to break.
Do not use for production.
Expect data loss.
Use at own risk.

Download

Two different types of images are provided. The server install image can be used to install onto the eMMC, SATA, or NVMe drive. The preinstalled server image can be used to run from the SD-card.

2024-08-24
2024-08-26 updated device-tree file name
2024-09-29 provide graphics drivers
2024-09-30 fix mesa and xorg packaging
2024-10-11 updated device-tree and kernel configuration
2024-11-20 pre-release images

UART

The board features makes both JTAG and UART available over a USB-C connector. They appears as four separate devices in Linux (/dev/ttyUSB0-/dev/ttyUSB3). The third ttyUSB device represents the UART. The baudrate is 115200 for U-Boot and Linux.

You can use the package picocom to access the serial console:

sudo apt-get install picocom
sudo picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB2

Using the server install image

Copying Ubuntu onto the SD-card

Download the Ubuntu live install server image and flash it on your sdcard using:

xzcat noble-installer-*.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M conv=fsync

You will have to replace /dev/sdX by the actual device name of your SD card. Please, be especially cautious not to overwrite the wrong drive as this cannot be undone.

Installation

Establish a serial console connection to the HiFive Premier P550 board.

sudo picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB2

Insert the SD card and power up the system.

If no prior operating system installation exists, U-Boot will start up GRUB on the SD card.

In the GRUB menu select Try or Install Ubuntu Server.

Loading the installer takes several minutes. Once it is loaded follow the installation steps in https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-server.

When the installation is finished reboot the board removing the SD card.

U-Boot does not allow the operating system to write UEFI variables. You have to do this manually. Use U-Boot's eficonfig command for this purpose.

Using the preinstalled server image

Copying Ubuntu onto the SD-card

Download the Ubuntu preinstalled server image and flash it on your sdcard using:

xzcat noble-p550*.img.xz | sudo dd bs=1M conv=fsync of=/dev/sdX

You will have to replace /dev/sdX by the actual device name of your SD card. Please, be especially cautious not to overwrite the wrong drive as this cannot be undone.

First boot

Establish a serial console connection to the HiFive Premier P550 board.

sudo picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB2

Insert the SD card and power on the board.

When booting the first time wait until you see an output line confirming that cloud-init has finished. Cloud init is responsible for generating the SSH keys and setting the default password. Cloud init itself will also need a few minutes. The line to wait for will look similar to

[  150.053340] cloud-init[1274]: Cloud-init v. 23.1.1-0ubuntu2 finished at Mon, 03 Apr 2023 11:14:35 +0000. Datasource DataSourceNoCloud [seed=/var/lib/cloud/seed/nocloud-net][dsmode=net].  Up 150.00 seconds

Now you can login with user ubuntu and the default password ubuntu and will be asked to choose a new password.