Tux Machines

Canonical enables Ubuntu on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer

Posted by Rianne Schestowitz on May 10, 2023,

updated May 13, 2023

Open standards and collaboration are strategic to both hardware and software across industries and geographies. In the last decade, open source and open standards have reshaped our world. RISC-V is the most prolific and open Instruction Set Architecture in history, which has led the hardware community to embrace open standards and collaboration at this level.

This open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is enabling a new era of processor innovation through open-standard collaboration with rapid industry-wide adoption. To become the industry standard ISA across computing, the RISC-V ISA enables software and hardware design freedom on architecture. The architecture can be applied to a broad range of processors, from low-end microcontrollers to high-end server-grade processors.

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OMG Ubuntu:

Ubuntu 23.04 Now Supports This ‘Powerful’ RISC-V Computer

This single-board computer (SBC) boasts greater performance than the company’s first-generation model (which Ubuntu announced support for last year) thanks, in part, to the inclusion of an integrated GPU – which makes it the first RISC-V board in the world to offer one.

It's FOSS:

Ubuntu Now Available on the World's First High-Performance RISC-V SBC with GPU

These boards are relatively compact and have varying levels of processing power that both tinkerers and hobbyists alike enjoy exploring.

And now.

Canonical has announced that Ubuntu is available on the World's first high-performance RISC-V SBC with an integrated GPU, called the StarFive VisionFive 2.

Let's dive in and take a look at more details.

Late coverage:

Lilbits: Ubuntu on the VisionFive 2 RISC-V single-board PC, mini PCs with Ryzen 7040HS, and Google’s new Find My Network

Canonical brings support for Ubuntu 23.04 to the StarFive VisionFive 2, a single-board PC with a 1.5 GHz quad-core JH7110 RISC-V processor with SiFive U74 CPU cores and Imagination BXE-4-32 MC1 graphics.

And some more:

An Ultra-Tiny RISC-V Emulator Turns the Raspberry Pi Pico Into a Functional, If Slow, Linux PC - Hackster.io

Electronics engineering student Vlad Tomoiagă is looking to get the diminutive Raspberry Pi Pico and its RP2040 microcontroller to run a functional Linux-based operating system — by having its Arm Cortex-M0+ cores emulate a 32-bit RISC-V chip.

"On power-up, the Linux image will be copied into RAM," Tomoiagă explains of his creation. "After a few seconds, Linux kernel messages will start streaming on the console. The boot process takes about one and a half minute[s]. A prebuilt Linux kernel and filesystem image […] must be placed in the root of the SD Card."