As of Ubuntu 4/22/01, Canonical officially provides images with RISC-V support. The distribution is adapted to StarFive’s VisionFive board.
Canonical officially provides images of Ubuntu 22.04.1 with support for RISC-V microprocessors. The distribution can be used with the Raspberry Pi-like single-board computer StarFive VisionFive V1 with JH7100 CPU with RISC-V instruction set.
“A natural choice”
In the announcement, Canonical writes that open source and open standards have changed the world and that the concept is now being extended to open source processor architectures with the RISC-V consortium. The free and open instruction set architecture (ISA) even enables a new era of processor innovations through cooperation with open standards and faster industry-wide adaptation.
The RISC-V-ISA delivers a new level of free, expandable software and hardware architecture. It can be used for a wide range of processors, from low-end microprocessors to high-end server processors.
Canonical emphasizes that RISC-V has great potential and a competitive instruction set architecture in multiple markets. With that in mind, porting Ubuntu to RISC-V and becoming the reference operating system for early adopters was a natural choice.
Concrete hardware support
In addition to the Starfive VisionFive, separate images also support the SiFive Unmatched developer board and the AllWinner Nezha board. Interested parties should only pull these images onto an SD or MicroSD card and can then start the boards from them.
The JH7100 processor works on the Starfive VisionFive V1, which according to Canonical represents the first generation of inexpensive RISC-V single-board computers. This contains two 64-bit CPU cores of the SiFive U74 type introduced in 2018, which are supposed to achieve the performance of ARM Cortex-A55 cores. With a clock frequency of 1 GHz, 2 MB cache and 4 to 8 GB main memory as well as some co-processors as peripherals, the board should also be suitable for accelerated AI calculations.
Another interesting and compatible RISC-V hardware board should be available from Pine in the near future. The Star64 is based on the StarFive JH7100 successor, the JH7110, which even has four SiFive U74 cores with a clock frequency of 1.5 GHz. The BXE-2-32 GPU from Imagination Technologies is said to be able to drive two 4K displays at 30 frames per second each. Pine wants to make it possible to choose between 4 or 8 GB of main memory and between one or two Gigabit Ethernet ports. In addition, the Star64 should bring PCIe, USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports and the obligatory 40-pin GPIO bar from handicraft boards. The targeted price point is under 100 euros.
Pre-installed images and an installation image are available on the Ubuntu RISC-V download page. However, it is still an early stage of development, Canonical restricts there.
(dmk)
