Installing Alpine Linux on OrangePi RV2

This material is work-in-progress ... Do not follow instructions here until this notice is removed. (Last edited by Aarch0x40 on 29 Mar 2026.)

Main Page > Architectures > Riscv64 > Installing Alpine Linux on OrangePi RV2

Warning: The contributors to the Alpine Linux project are not responsible for any damage/loss experienced by using the following guide. This article is provided as a general reference to be adapted to your specific setup. It is assumed that the implementer will have the knowledge and ability to close the gap between what is described here and their specific setup.

The OrangePi RV2 is a credit-card sized development board with a Ky X1 8-Core SoC. The Ky X1 is for all intents and purposes a SpacemiT K1 SoC. The remainder of this guide is more likely to use the terms SpacemiT or K1 as is prevalent throughout the Linux community. Please understand that these terms all refer to the same RISC-V ISA implementation.

Known issues

Warning: The following are the issues that are known to exist between the result of this guide and the manufacturer provided image

• WiFi is not functional
• Manufacturer tools are not included
• Custom built and manually installed kernel required

Setting up a workspace

Begin by setting up a RISC-V workspace by following Running Alpine riscv64 in QEMU. You'll need to establish a build environment in this QEMU guest.

doas apk add alpine-sdk bison flex openssl-dev ncurses ncurses-dev

Note: ncurses and ncurses-dev aren't a hard requirements but are useful if you want to run make menuconfig

Cloning the source, configuring and building the kernel

Unfortunately the stock kernels provided by the Alpine Linux project and even the source tarballs from kernel.org will not work. There's still a bit of patchwork involved as not all support is upstreamed.