Maybe Canonical will expand into Hardware now and release a matching RISC-V computer too. Would match the “we want to be the Apple of the Linux World” vibe I get from Canonical for years.
Hm. They also plan on dropping support for 90% of existing RISC-V systems.
There isn’t really any RVA22 hardware you’d really want to run a desktop on anyway, so it’s a very logical decision. RVA23 is a much more sensible base - it requires Vector and Hypervisor.
Just the old standards, RVA20 and below. RVA23 is the current standard, and they’re just moving ahead with that because it’s kind of pointless to keep all the other compilation cruft around when nobody is going to use it.
Whatever it supports I bet Jeff Geerling is on it
I think this can be a good idea in… 5 years maybe? It will only works on qemu, witch board suppose to have this things? I only know one board with all of thins things in ARM, risc-v is too young. I can’t imagine a competitive risc-v board at the moment
I work in RISC-V CPU development and I’d say 5-10 years is about right for when we’ll see usable RISC-V desktop class machines.
This boards haven’t got the rv23 necessary extensions, and aren’t competitive, they are expensive for their performance. There only one attractive is the risc-v cpu for learning, etc
Those chips not supporting RV23 isn’t super surprising, they were released in 2023 while RV23 was only ratified in 2024.
Ubuntu requiring RV23 however does surprise me (I admit I didn’t read the article), that seems premature, but I suppose it’s a good baseline going forward. Last time I looked at any of the chips none of them supported the V extension, and those that did were majority only supported the incompatible pre-standard version.
Yea this is what I was saying whan I talked about the risc-v ecosistem isn’t competitive (at the moment). For me the bests boards at the moment are the based in the spacemmit k1, supports the majority of the rv23 profile extensions (not everything, and for this reason not will be compatible with the new versions for Ubuntu), and full rv22, including rvv 1.0. I have an orange pi rv2 (they use a renamed k1 for some weird reason), and works very well… For 50$, not for more
I guess currently it’s a chicken and egg situation for OEMs. They can’t consider RISC-V based boards/laptops because there is no or minimal software for it. Also, porting to RISC-V can’t be that expensive of an endeavor. Most unix software is already portable.
Yes, it’s a difficult situation to get out. I think the ecosystem is growing very fast, but enough fast for the ubuntu way? I don’t think so
