StarFive Category - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

September 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Linux 6.11 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.11 is out with Linus Torvalds’ announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML): I’m once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it’s Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out. The last week was actually pretty quiet and calm, which is nice to see. The shortlog is below for anybody who wants to look at the details, but it really isn’t very many patches, and the patches are all pretty small. Nothing in particular stands out – the biggest patch in here is for Hyper-V Confidential Computing documentation. Anyway, with this, the merge window will obviously open tomorrow, and I already have 40+ pull requests pending. That said, exactly _because_ I’m on the road, it will probably be a fairly slow start to the merge window, since not only am I on my laptop, there’s OSS Europe starting tomorrow and then the […]

August 8, 2024August 9, 2024 by Debashis Das - No Comments

Geniatech XPI-7110 – A Raspberry Pi-sized RISC-V SBC based on StarFive JH7110 processor

Geniatech XPI-7110 is a RISC-V single-board computer (SBC) built on StarFive JH7110 with a form factor similar to that of a Raspberry Pi 3 and equipped with up to 8GB of RAM, 256GB of eMMC storage. It comes with various I/O options including USB ports, HDMI 2.0, GbE Ethernet, Wi-Fi/BT, GPIO, camera, display, and much more. The company also mentions that the board will be available in both commercial and industrial variants and will include a 10+ year lifecycle The new Geniatech board is very similar to the Milk-V Mars that we wrote about a few months ago. Additionally, we have written about PineTab-V, Pine64 Star64 SBC, and Milk-V Meles SBC all of which are built around the StarFive JH7110 or T-Head TH1520 RISC-V SoC, feel free to check those out if you are interested in the topic. Geniatech XPI-7110 SBC specifications: SoC – StarFive JH7110 CPU – Quad-core RISC-V processor […]

July 15, 2024July 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linux 6.10 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.10 on LKML: So the final week was perhaps not quote as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don’t love – but it also wasn’t noisy enough to warrant an extra rc. And much of the noise this last week was bcachefs again (with netfs a close second), so it was all pretty compartmentalized. In fact, about a third of the patch for the last week was filesystem-related (there were also some btrfs latency fixes and other noise), which is unusual, but none of it looks particularly scary. Another third was drivers, and the rest is “random”. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.11 opens up tomorrow. Let’s see how that goes, with much of Europe probably making ready for summer vacation. And the shortlog below is – as always – just the last week, not some kind […]

May 28, 2024May 28, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Canonical releases Ubuntu 24.04 Server image for Milk-V Mars RISC-V SBC

Canonical has been releasing Ubuntu RISC-V images for SBCs and QEMU at least since 2021. The latest addition is an Ubuntu 24.04 Server image for the Mars credit-card-size SBC powered by StarFive JH7110 quad-core RISC-V SoC and designed by Shenzhen Milk-V Technology. That means we now have Ubuntu Server images for the QEMU emulator, AllWinner Nezha SBC, Microchip Polarfire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit, SiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard, Sipeed LicheeRV Dock, StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC, and the Mars SBC. You’ll note there aren’t any Ubuntu Desktop images for now, because the GPU (if any) in RISC-V SoCs is not yet fully supported. Mars SBC specifications: SoC – StarFive JH7110 CPU – Quad-core RISC-V processor (RV64GC) at up to 1.5GHz GPU – Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU with support for OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.2 VPU H.264 & H.265 4Kp60 decoding H.265 1080p30 encoding JPEG encoder / decoder System Memory – 1GB, […]

May 13, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.9 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.9 on LKML: So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream. So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal). Below is the shortlog for the last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but “big” is still pretty small, and there’s various other driver noise in there too). Outside of drivers, it’s some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core networking fixes. And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine […]

March 11, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 6.8 release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.8 on the Linux kernel mailing list: So it took a bit longer for the commit counts to come down this release than I tend to prefer, but a lot of that seemed to be about various selftest updates (networking in particular) rather than any actual real sign of problems. And the last two weeks have been pretty quiet, so I feel there’s no real reason to delay 6.8. We always have some straggling work, and we’ll end up having some of it pushed to stable rather than hold up the new code. Nothing worrisome enough to keep the regular release schedule from happening. As usual, the shortlog below is just for the last week since rc7, the overall changes in 6.8 are obviously much much bigger. This is not the historically big release that 6.7 was – we seem to […]

January 8, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 6.7 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.7, following Linux 6.6 LTS a little over two months ago: So we had a little bit more going on last week compared to the holiday week before that, but certainly not enough to make me think we’d want to delay this any further. End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we’ve ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release. The main changes this last week were a few DRM updates (mainly fixes for new hw enablement in this version – both amd and nouveau), some more bcachefs fixes (and bcachefs is obviously new to 6.7 and one of the reasons for the large number of commits), and then a few random […]

December 31, 2023December 31, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

2023 Year in review – Top 10 posts, statistics, and what to expect in 2024

It’s the last day and last article of the year, so we will look at some highlights of 2023, some traffic statistics on the CNX Software website, and speculate what interesting developments may happen in 2024. Looking back at 2023 The semiconductor shortage that had happened since 2020 started to fade away in early 2023, and supplies for most electronics components and devices seem to be adequate at this time, so that was a bright spot this year, and hopefully, it will stay that way in 2024 despite geopolitical tensions. We did not have any super exciting new Arm application processors from Rockchip, Amlogic, or Allwinner announced this year, although the Amlogic S928X penta-core Cortex-A76/A55 CPU started to show up in some 8K TV boxes. The launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC with a Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Cortex-A76 processor was probably the main highlight for Arm on this side […]