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February 9, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.19 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 6.19 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): No big surprises anywhere last week, so 6.19 is out as expected – just as the US prepares to come to a complete standstill later today watching the latest batch of televised commercials. The betting man would expect them all to be AI-generated, but maybe some enterprising company decides to buck the trend? Doubtful, but there’s always a slight chance. But for anybody outside the US, maybe taking the newest kernel out for a spin instead is an option? I have more than three dozen pull requests for when the merge window opens tomorrow – thank you to all the early maintainers. And as people have mostly figured out, I’m getting to the point where I’m being confused by large numbers (almost running out of fingers and toes again), so the next kernel is going to […]

December 31, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Year 2025 in Review, CNX Software stats, and looking ahead to 2026

Time for the last post of 2025, as the year is almost over. I’ll look back at key developments and notable products launched in 2025, share some CNX Software website traffic statistics, and look ahead to 2026. Year 2025 in Review After 22 product releases in 2024, Raspberry Pi calmed down a little bit in 2025, and the highlights of the year included the Raspberry Pi 500+ mechanical keyboard, the 5-inch variant of the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2, and a Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM. What didn’t quite stop were the accessories from third parties for Raspberry Pi SBC and Raspberry Pi Pico boards. The most exciting Arm SoC release of 2025 was probably the 12-core CIX P1 Armv9 SoC found in Radxa Orion O6 SBC, MINISFORUM MS-R1 Arm mini PC, and Orange Pi 6 Plus board, but while performance was fine, it was overhyped in 2024, and software […]

December 31, 2025January 4, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

VisionFive 2 Lite SBC Review – Ubuntu 24.04 on a low-cost RISC-V SBC in 2026

VisionFive 2 Lite RISC-V SBC Ubuntu Review 2026

StarFive has sent me a sample of the VisionFive 2 Lite RISC-V SBC for review. It’s a low-cost credit card-sized board based on the StarFive JH7110S quad-core RISC-V SBC and designed to get started with Linux RISC-V on the cheap. When I first tested the earlier VisionFive 2 SBC with a StarFive JH7110 RISC-V SoC in February 2023, I didn’t call it a review, but rather a hands-on experience, since, at the time, many features still didn’t work properly. Almost three years have passed since then, so reviewing the VisionFive 2 Lite SBC with Ubuntu 24.04 will allow us to see how much progress has been made on the software side. If you are in a rush, you can jump to the what works, what doesn’t section. VisionFive 2 Lite unboxing I received the board in a plastic box with a cover reading “VisionFive 2 Lite Your Gateway to RISC-V”. […]

December 1, 2025December 12, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Linux 6.18 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.18 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), which will likely become the next LTS kernel [update: it’s now official]: So I’ll have to admit that I’d have been happier with slightly less bugfixing noise in this last week of the release, but while there’s a few more fixes than I would hope for, there was nothing that made me feel like this needs more time to cook. So 6.18 is tagged and pushed out. Most of the last-minute fixes are minor fixes to drivers, with some random noise elsewhere (bluetooth, ceph, afs..). Nothing strikes me as standing out, but hey, there’s a shortlog appended if you want to see the details. And this obviously means that the merge window will open tomorrow, and I already have three dozen pull requests pending. Thanks. And as I already mentioned a couple of […]

August 7, 2025August 7, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

VisionFive 2 Lite low-cost RISC-V SBC launched for $19.90 and up (Crowdfunding)

StarFive VisionFive 2 Lite is a low-cost, credit card-sized RISC-V SBC powered by a 1.25 GHz JH7110S quad-core 64-bit processor and equipped with 2GB to 8GB RAM, and a microSD card slot for storage. It’s the little brother of the VisionFive 2 Pico-ITX SBC introduced in 2022, but in a more compact Raspberry Pi-like form factor with an M.2 2242 socket for storage, Gigabit Ethernet, optional WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4, four USB ports, HDMI 2.0, MIPI DSI and CSI connector, and a 40-pin GPIO header. VisionFive 2 Lite specifications: SoC – StarFive JH7110S (a low-cost version of the JH7110 clocked up to 1.25 GHz) CPU – Quad-core 64-bit RISC-V (SiFive U74 – RV64GC) processor @ up to 1.25 GHz GPU – Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.2 VPU 4Kp60 H.265/H.264 video decoder 1080p30 H.265 video encoder JPEG encoder/decoder System Memory – 2GB, 4GB, or […]

July 28, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Linux 6.16 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.16 on LKML: It’s Sunday afternoon, and the release cycle has come to an end. Last week was nice and calm, and there were no big show-stopper surprises to keep us from the regular schedule, so I’ve tagged and pushed out 6.16 as planned. It’s worth noting that the upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me: I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I’m spending about half the month traveling. That means that I will try very hard to get most of the merge window done the first week before my travels start, and I already ended upgiving a heads-up on that to the people who tend to send me the most pull requests. […]

February 8, 2025February 8, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

OpenWrt 24.10 released with Linux 6.6, TLS 1.3 by default, and 1970 supported devices

OpenWrt 24.10 open-source lightweight Linux operating system for routers has just been released. It’s been upgraded to Linux 6.6 from Linux 5.15 in OpenWrt 2023.05, supports TLS 1.3 by default, improves support for WiFi 6 (802.11ax), and adds initial support for WiFi 7 (802.11be). After over one year of work since the release of OpenWrt 23.05, OpenWrt 24.10 adds over 5400 commits, and the total number of supported devices is now close to 2,000 at 1,970. It’s also the first stable release supporting OpenWrt One, the router directly designed by OpenWrt developers in collaboration with Banana Pi. OpenWrt 24.10 highlights: TLS 1.3 support in default images with MbedTLS 3.6 Activate POSIX Access Control Lists and file system security attributes for all file systems on devices with big flash sizes. Needed by docker. Note this is not enabled for all targets with the small_flash feature flag, including ath79/tiny, bcm47xx/legacy, lantiq/ase, lantiq/xrx200_legacy, […]

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 […]