Introduced almost a decade ago, RISC-V, the open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), has come a long way since, with rapid growth in adoption across different verticals.
As expected, that upward trend has given rise to many organizations that have started manufacturing hardware based on the RISC-V architecture, with Milk-V being one such name.
They claim Mars to be the world's first credit-card-sized small board computer (SBC) that delivers solid performance in a compact form factor. It is powered by a StarFive JH7110 64-bit SoC with RV64GC that can go to speeds of up to 1.5 GHz, with the option to go for up to 8 GB of LPDDR4 RAM.
And, now, Canonical has announced that they are introducing an Ubuntu 24.04 image for the Milk-V Mars, with some more details on how they intend to move forward with RISC-V.
Ubuntu 24.04 on Milk-V Mars: What to Expect?
As it stands, Canonical has gone into a strategic cooperation agreement with Milk-V to bring Ubuntu to such “novel RISC-V devices”. With this deal, Milk-V will be sending hardware to Canonical so that they can offer Ubuntu as an official distro offering that regularly receives tailored updates.
On the other hand, Canonical intends to take advantage of Milk-V's products and engineering teams to provide even better support for the RISC-V architecture as a whole. They have confirmed that they will offer developer preview Ubuntu images for any new Milk-V product that is rolled out.
Canonical also added that:
This collaboration is aimed at providing users of the RISC-V architecture platform with a rich operating system designed to enhance development and user experiences.
With this, Ubuntu is among the first Linux distributions to fully commit to supporting devices based on the RISC-V platform. It is good to see that they have pushed for this.
You can go through the announcement to learn more.
Want to Check it Out?
Well, for now, Canonical has only provided the Ubuntu Server images for the Milk-V Mars, as there is no support for the onboard GPU.
Similarly, USB 2.0 ports don't work, as Canonical mentions Linux kernel 6.8 doesn't have support for those, with Wi-Fi cards and external GPUs also not being supported due to some limitations.
You can visit the official website to get the image. You can check the official wiki for instructions.
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