Install Ubuntu on the Milk-V Mars CM and CM Lite

The Milk-V Mars CM is a RISC-V based SBC.

Warning

The Milk-V Mars CM is not yet supported by official Ubuntu images.

NVMe support

For attaching an NVMe drive the Waveshare CM4-IO-BASE-A board can be used.

Warning

On the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 IO Board NVMe drives do not work.

The Milk-V Mars CM does not drive the line PCIE_PWR_EN to enable power to the m.2 connector.

Boot source selection

The Milk-V Mars CM board can boot firmware from SPI flash or UART. The boot source is selected via the nRPIBOOT line. When connected to ground booting form UART is selected.

On the Waveshare CM4-IO-BASE-A board a switch labeled “BOOT” is connected to the nRPIBOOT line. Switch it to to “OFF” to boot from SPI flash and to “ON” to boot from UART.

Boot select

UART console

The UART is available on the Waveshare CM4-IO-BASE-A board via the GPIO connector. Assuming the typical coloring of USB to TTL serial adapters the following connections have to be made:

Board

Adapter

GND, pin 6

GND, black

TX, pin 8

RX, white

RX, pin 10

TX, green

Do not connect the red 3.3 V wire.

UART

Connect with the following settings (see Connect to a UART console):

  • 115200 baud

  • 8 data bits

  • no parity

  • 1 stop bit

  • no flow control

Limitations

  • The on-board GPU is not supported

  • PCIe support is incomplete: an NVMe drive can be used, but Wi-Fi cards and external GPUs don’t work

  • While the 3 USB 3.0 ports are working, the USB 2.0 port is not supported by the 6.8 kernel