K230 CanMV

K230 RISC-V SoC

The K230 chip is the latest generation SoC product in Canaan Technology’s Kendryte series of AIOT chips.

Mainline support

The support for following drivers are already enabled:

  1. ns16550 UART

  2. DWC2 OTG USB controller

Building

  1. Get the RISC-V toolchain.

  2. Setup cross compilation environment variable:

  3. Get the firmware_gen.py from vendor.

export CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-linux-gnu-
cd <U-Boot-dir>
make k230_canmv_defconfig
make
cp u-boot-gz.img u-boot-gz.img.tmp
pip install gmssl pycryptodome
python3 firmware_gen.py -i u-boot-gz.img.tmp -o u-boot-head.img -n

This will generate u-boot-head.img.

Booting

Currently, we rely on vendor u-boot-spl to initialize the ddr and load the u-boot image, then bootup from it.

  1. Prepare a SD card with the vendor image burned on it.

  2. Write the U-Boot image to the SD card at offset 2MB.

dd if=u-boot-head.img of=/dev/sd[x] bs=1M seek=2

  1. Insert the SD card into the board and power it on.

Sample boot log from K230 CanMV board 

U-Boot 2025.01-00645-g2d81c4788455 (Jan 14 2025 - 23:15:07 +0800)
DRAM: 512 MiB
Core: 15 devices, 11 uclasses, devicetree: separate
Loading Environment from nowhere... OK
In: serial@91400000
Out: serial@91400000
Err: serial@91400000
Net: No ethernet found.
K230# cpu list
 0: cpu@0 thead,c908
K230# usb start
starting USB...
Bus usb@91540000: USB DWC2
scanning bus usb@91540000 for devices...
Warning: r8152_eth (eth0) using random MAC address - 1e:33:97:47:e6:32
2 USB Device(s) found
K230# usb tree
USB device tree:
 1 Hub (480 Mb/s, 0mA)
 | U-Boot Root Hub
 |
 +-2 Vendor specific (480 Mb/s, 100mA)
 Realtek USB 10/100 LAN 000000000000
K230#