canonical News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

May 19, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Ubuntu Core 26 targets IoT devices and embedded systems, offers up to 15 years of security maintenance

Canonical has just introduced Ubuntu Core 26, based on the recently-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and designed for IoT devices and embedded systems, with precise Linux builds, optimized OTA updates, live kernel patching, and enhanced hardware-backed protection for mission-critical deployments. Offered with up to 15 years of security maintenance, Ubuntu Core 26 minimal, immutable operating system enables reduced installation times, 90% smaller OTA updates, and precision-led builds via Chisel. Every component is a containerized snap, just like in prior Ubuntu Core releases. Canonical says it can help companies meet requirements for the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) with securely designed and private AI deployments relying on hardware-based trust. Ubuntu Core 26 highlights: Faster snap installation and updates – An improved snap-delta format reduces update sizes between 50% and 90% for most snaps. For instance, updates to the Core base snaps dropped from 16MB to 1.5MB in size. This lowers data usage […]

October 30, 2025October 30, 2025 by Debashis Das - 15 Comments

ESWIN EBC7702 Mini-DTX motherboard offers EIC7702X RISC-V SoC, up to 64GB RAM, Ubuntu 24.04 support

ESWIN Computing, in collaboration with Canonical, has launched the EBC7702 Mini-DTX motherboard, a RISC-V development platform with ESWIN’s new EIC7702X dual-die RISC-V SoC. This board can be considered an upgrade from the previous EBC7700 SBC and is designed for more demanding AI and data processing tasks. The motherboard features an 8-core 64-bit dual-die RISC-V CPU with an integrated AI accelerator delivering up to 40 TOPS (INT8) and 20 TFLOPS (FP16) performance. It supports up to 64GB LPDDR5 memory, 32GB onboard eMMC flash, and multiple storage interfaces, including M.2, SPI Flash, and MicroSD. Connectivity options include four Gigabit Ethernet ports, Wi-Fi, two HDMI outputs, two PCIe Gen3.0 x16 slots, USB 3.0/2.0 ports, and four fan headers. With support for AI, display, and camera modules, the board is designed for video analysis and edge AI workloads. ESWIN EBC7702 specifications: SoC – ESWIN EIC7702X dual-die RISC-V SoC CPU – 8x 64-bit Out-of-Order RISC-V […]

July 16, 2025July 18, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Canonical and ESWIN announces EBC77 RISC-V SBC with Ubuntu 24.04 support

ESWIN Computing, in collaboration with Canonical, has announced the EBC77 Series single board computer (SBC) with support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and designed for education, embedded systems, and general-purpose applications The credit card-sized board is based on the EIC7700X quad-core 64-bit RISC-V SoC with a 19.95 TOPS NPU, and features 64-bit LPDDR5 memory, an 8MP SPI flash, a microSD card slot, a micro HDMI port, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, four USB 3.0/2.0 ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header. ESWIN EBC77 specifications: SoC – ESWIN EIC7700X CPU – 4x SiFive Performance P550 RV64GC RISC-V cores @ up to 1.8GHz with Cortex-A75-class performance NPU – Up to 19.95 TOPS in INT8, 9.975 TOPS in INT16, and 9.975 FTOPS in FP16 Vision Engine HAE (2D Blit, Crop, Resize, Normalization) Imagination AXM-8-256 3D GPU (support OpenGL-ES 3.2, EGL 1.4, OpenCL 1.2/2.1 EP2, Vulkan 1.2, Android NN HAL) OSD (3 layers) Vision DSP […]

July 8, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Ubuntu 25.10 release to mandate RVA23 profile, obsoleting most RISC-V hardware

RISC-V is an open architecture standard that provides flexibility, and chip designers can add or remove instructions as they please to match their application requirements. That’s all great until complex software designed to run on multiple platforms is involved. That’s why for Linux and Android support, the RVA (RISC-V Application) profiles were created, so that every RISC-V SoC designed for those systems meets some minimal requirements and shared instructions, to which you would also add more if needed, as long as they don’t break the standard. The RISC-V association ratified the latest RVA23 profile for 64-bit RISC-V in October 2024, which notably mandates support for the vector and hypervisor extensions. OMGUbuntu also reports that Canonical has decided to raise the required RISC-V ISA profile family to RVA23, or more exactly RVA23U64, from RVA20 for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release. In other words, going forward, Ubuntu will only be supported on […]

May 1, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Canonical releases Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop image for the Qualcomm DragonWing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors

Canonical has just released a publicly available Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop beta image for the Qualcomm DragonWing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors, and more specifically for the Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 Vision Kit (QCS6490) and Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 Lite Vision Kit (QCS5430). This adds to the existing Ubuntu 24.04 Server image for the Qualcomm vision kits, and Canonical says the unified image is currently designed for developers, ODMs/OEMs, and customers who want to evaluate the solution, and certified versions of Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop and Server images are coming soon with long term support and maintenance. Canonical explains the image enables the full Ubuntu Desktop experience at the edge with “powerful AI acceleration with high-performance graphics” (so I assume that means GPU and NPU are already supported), enhanced camera and multimedia capabilities, sensor integration, and various performance optimizations of the DragonWing family. So the way I read the announcement is that contrary […]

March 20, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Canonical now officially supports Ubuntu on NVIDIA Jetson system-on-modules

The NVIDIA JetPack SDK has been based on Ubuntu ever since it was created (although the Jetpack 6 SDK changed that somewhat), so I was surprised to read that Canonical now officially supports Ubuntu on NVIDIA Jetson, since I assumed there may have already been a partnership in place. The announcement explains that Canonical has announced the General Availability (GA) of Ubuntu for the NVIDIA Jetson Orin for edge AI and robotics “bringing enterprise-grade stability and support” to the popular system-on-modules. Canonical further explains the collaboration enables better performance with optimized Ubuntu images for the NVIDIA Jetson platform, enterprise-level security with updates and long-term support, a unified environment from edge to cloud, and improved stability and reliability with Canonical’s QA team performing over 500 OS compatibility-focused hardware tests. If we visit the NVIDIA Jetson page of the Ubuntu website, we’ll find Ubuntu Server 22.04 images for the Jetson AGX Orin, […]

June 18, 2024August 22, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II with SpacemIT K1 octa-core SoC to run Ubuntu supported by Canonical

Deep Computing has announced the DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II powered by a 2.0 GHz SpacemIT K1 octa-core 64-bit RISC-V processor coupled with up to 16GB DDR4 and running Ubuntu with official support from Canonical. Deep Computing unveiled the first RISC-V laptop – named ROMA – in 2022 but it never really took off because of all the web3 and cryptocurrency features plus the ultra-high price. The new DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II does without those and features a 14-inch IPS display, a 1TB SSD, a WiFI 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 module, a webcam, several USB ports including a USB-C with DisplayPort Alr mode, and a “development interface” with a few GPIOs. DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II specifications: SoC – SpacemiT K1 CPU – 8-core X60 RISC-V processor @ up to 2.0 GHz; single-core performance equivalent to about 1.3x the performance of an Arm Cortex-A55 GPU – Imagination IMG BXE-2-32 with support for […]

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, […]