A RISC-V SBC with numerous problems

RISC-V processors may not be as popular as their Arm counterparts, but they have been popping up in the consumer space in recent months. If you're just as excited about this new technology, you've probably heard of Milk-V, a company that's holding the RISC-V helm by producing budget-friendly RISC-V systems instead of expensive industrial-grade hardware.

The Milk-V Mars is one such affordable SBC that abandons traditional Arm and x86/64 CPUs in favor of a processor supported by the RISC-V ISA. In terms of specs, the Mars is one of Milk-V's more powerful boards and is miles ahead of its siblings, the Duo and Duo S, in terms of processing capacity.

But after spending some time with the Mars board, I noticed many glaring weaknesses in the SBC—and I'm not even talking about the performance issues that the RISC-V ISA is notorious for.

​​​​About this review: Milk-V sent me the Mars SBC along with other equipment, including the Jupiter Mini-ITX motherboard. However, the review is full of my own opinions and the company had no influence on the content of the article.

A RISC-V SBC

Milk-V Mars

However, in its current state it is largely useless

49$ 70$ Save $21

The Milk-V Mars is a credit card-sized SBC equipped with a Starfive JH7110 processor based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Although it is cheaper than other SBCs on the market, the Mars has some glaring software issues.

Per

• Budget-friendly
• Good selection of I/O ports

Disadvantages

• No Wi-Fi or Bluetooth functionality
• Official operating system images are a complete mess
• Pathetic app support
• Occasional disruptions and errors

Prices and release date

The Milk-V Mars was launched last year. The cheapest version of the SBC has 2GB of RAM and costs $40. If you want more RAM, you can upgrade to the 4GB or 8GB variants for $50 and $70 respectively. International users can buy the device from Arace, where the products are often available at discounted prices. You can also technically buy it from Amazon, although the third-party sellers tend to charge higher prices for the SBC.

Design and connections

A cool design marred by the lack of wireless connectivity options

The Milk-V Mars is an all-white board whose main feature is a RISC-V based StarFive JH7110 SoC. For RAM, you can choose between 2GB, 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory, while an eMMC slot and a microSD card serve as storage equipment.

Aside from the cool-looking white exterior, the SBC is the same size as the Raspberry Pi 5, although there are many differences between the two. For example, you only get one full-size HDMI port instead of two mini HDMI ports, alongside a dedicated microphone jack.

You also get a good selection of USB ports, as well as two MIPI-DSI sockets and a MIPI-CSI header. The lack of Bluetooth and WiFi functionality is a real mood killer, although the SBC does come with an M.2 E-Key slot where you can install a small WiFi card. There's an onboard Ethernet port, limited to 1GbE bandwidth, and you've got the regular 40-pin GPIO headers you'd expect from an SBC.

software

Debian 11 has several compatibility issues

Now that we've gotten past the striking appearance of the Milk-V Mars, it's time to discuss the software aspect of the SBC. Milk-V lists Ubuntu and Debian as official images for Mars, although both have some terribly annoying issues that need to be addressed in depth. We'll leave the Ubuntu image issues for later, as setting up Debian was pretty straightforward, as all I had to do was flash the ISO to a microSD card and use that as the boot drive.

Since the Mars comes with a DIP switch, all I had to do was set the GPIO0 and GPIO1 switches to 1 and 0 respectively to boot from the microSD card. After powering the Milk-V Mars via the USB Type-C port, I connected it to my Acer KG281K monitor via the HDMI port. And then it was all downhill.

Before I could type Milkv as the password on the login page, the monitor started displaying horizontal lines along the screen. A few seconds later, the screen started flickering before going completely dark. I changed the display and power cables for both the monitor and the Milk-V Mars, but the end result was the same. Since I couldn't reproduce any of these issues on my other PCs, it was clear that the monitor was not the cause of the problem. When I connected my Uperfect UGame K118 portable monitor to the Milk-V Mars, the horizontal lines appeared again, meaning there was something wrong with the SBC.

I eventually hooked it up to my 1920 x 1080 Acer KG221Q and apparently a slightly lower resolution monitor was all I needed to boot into Debian. Once I finally got into the operating system, I was greeted by a lackluster selection of apps. In fact, the only usable applications were Firefox, the file manager, extensions, and good old Terminal – and the last three are built-in utilities, not third-party applications.

Regardless, I needed to expand the primary partition to 64GB microSD if I wanted to install more apps on the SBC. So I installed GParted via the terminal. But after expanding the partition, I couldn't install any other app except GParted and Gimp. Even common applications like Docker, Snap Store, Thunderbird, Chromium and LibreOffice didn't work on the SBC.

Aside from the slow performance when running Gimp, Firefox was the only app I could use on the Milk-V Mars, although it became a lagfest as soon as I opened more than three tabs. To make matters worse, the Debian ISO was last updated in November 2023, so the company had plenty of time to fix things. With Debian 11 being a colossal failure (yes, it's not even the latest version of the distro), it was time to look at the other operating systems. I secretly wish I had stopped testing the Milk-V Mars at that point, because things would have gotten a lot worse…

Ubuntu is not worth it while DietPi won't boot

Since Ubuntu is ported to virtually every device, you'd think the golden child of the Linux ecosystem would at least work on Mars. Although there is an official version of Ubuntu 24.04 for the SBC, installing it is an absolute nightmare.

For example, you can't boot Ubuntu the traditional way. Of course, you'll need to flash the image to a microSD card, but you'll also need a USB to Serial TTL cable to SSH into the SBC. If you've used the Milk-V Duo S, you might already be familiar with this cable, although the setup procedure is a hundred times harder. We'd be here all day if I talked about everything that went wrong with the Ubuntu installation process, so I'll end by saying that while I was able to get Ubuntu running on the SBC somehow, it wasn't worth all the hassle.

There was still some hope for the SBC, however, as some forum posts mentioned that it was compatible with an experimental version of DietPi designed for the StarFive JH7110 SoC. Unfortunately, I was unable to boot into the OS even after flashing the image to separate microSD cards!

Should you buy the Milk-V Mars?

The Milk-V Mars is worth your hard-earned money if:

• You don't mind buying a semi-useless SBC that can only run a handful of tools.
• They're willing to wait another year or two in the hope that Mars gets the app support it deserves.

You should stay away from Mars if:

• Your mental health is important to you and you don't want to go through the torture of setting up Ubuntu on the device.
• You want a simple, beginner-friendly SBC that works with different operating system images.
• They plan to use it for craft projects.

As much as I wanted to love the Milk-V Mars, I just can't recommend it to anyone, and it's by far the worst item I've ever reviewed here on XDA. That's a shame, because I'm a fan of the RISC-V ISA and really want it to go mainstream. If it was a regular, hard-to-use microcontroller that cost less than $10, I wouldn't complain about it so much.

But we are talking about a $40 SBC that has been on the market for quite a while. Even if I Quirks Shortcomings given its RISC-V roots, the abysmal software and bugs are inexcusable. Worse still, when I recently reviewed the Milk-V Jupiter, the mini-ITX motherboard had an extremely straightforward installation process for all of its operating systems, including various versions of Bianbu, Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu. In its current state, I'd suggest avoiding the Milk-V Mars. Instead, check out the budget-friendly Duo S or the recently released Jupiter motherboard if you want a taste of the RISC-V experience.

A RISC-V SBC

Milk-V Mars

However, in its current state it is largely useless

The Milk-V Mars is a credit card-sized SBC equipped with a Starfive JH7110 processor based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Although it is cheaper than other SBCs on the market, the Mars has some glaring software issues.