Canonical Adds the Orange Pi RV2 to Its List of Officially-Supported Ubuntu-Capable RISC-V Boards
"We believe that it's important to do our part to help RISC-V succeed and gain acceptance as an open standard," the company says.
Canonical has announced it is adding yet another RISC-V single-board computer to its build list for official Ubuntu Linux operating system images: the recently-released Orange Pi RV2.
"We're delighted to add this latest piece of hardware to our certified ecosystem, as we're committed to providing developers and innovators with access to the latest open-source hardware and software," the company says of the software release. "We anticipate that these new Ubuntu developer images will have a big impact and help developers build, prototype, and deploy cutting-edge applications on RISC-V technology."
Orange Pi launched the RV2 single-board computer back in early March, promising a compact form factor for low-power on-device machine learning (ML) and edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) projects. At its heart is the Ky X1 system-on-chip with eight RISC-V cores and a "CPU-fused" neural processing subsystem delivering a claimed two tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8-precision compute.
Powerful hardware isn't much use without the software to match, though, and that's where Canonical's release of an official Ubuntu Linux image comes in. Canonical has been slowly increasing its support for the RISC-V ecosystem: the company has released custom "developer preview" Ubuntu images for Microchip's PIC64GX Curiosity Kit and PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit boards, the Milk-V Mars single-board computer, the SiFive Unmatched, StarFive VisionFive 2, and Sipeed LicheeRV Dock, along with images for the first Linux-capable RISC-V single-board computer, the AllWinner Nezha D1 — and now the Orange Pi RV2.
"At Canonical," the company claims, "we believe that it's important to do our part to help RISC-V succeed and gain acceptance as an open standard. Ubuntu's availability on the Orange Pi RV2 is a testament to the continued collaboration between Canonical and the broader RISC-V community. The partnership brings all the ease of use, robust tooling and extensive packaging ecosystem that Ubuntu is known for to a new generation of RISC-V devices."
Unlike the company's previous operating system image releases, though, the Orange Pi RV2 images aren't available on the Ubuntu website proper, and at the time of writing had not yet been added to the RISC-V download page; instead, they're being released on the Orange Pi website.
