starfive News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

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 […]

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 […]

April 30, 2024April 29, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

SBC Case Builder v3.0 can create thousands of cases for popular SBCs and standard motherboards (mini-ITX, Pico-ITX, NUC…)

SBC Case Builder V3.0 case design utility has just been released with the ability to create over 1,000 standard cases – not including customization – for popular SBCs from Raspberry Pi, Hardkernel, Orange Pi, Radxa, and others, as well as standard motherboards following Mini-ITX, Pico-ITX, NUC, Nano-ITX, etc.., and SBC adapters following these standards, meaning you could install a Raspberry Pi 5 into a mini-ITX case if needed. SBC Case Builder started as a command line utility for designing DIY case for SBCs relying on OpenSDAD in April 2022, but Edward Kisiel (hominoids) quickly released version 2 with a GUI in October or the same, and has now further improved the utility with the release of SBC Case Builder v3.0. Version 3.0 comes with many improvements but the main focus was to reuse existing and new PC standard form factor cases by creating SBC adapters and custom I/O Shields since […]