Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has announced that Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS has been ported to Allwinner’s Nezha RISC-V boards. The Nezha is an artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) board based on Allwinner’s D1 SoC that’s based on the open-source processor architecture, RISC-V.
According to Shaorui Huang, a General Manager at Allwinner, RISC-V has become more popular in recent years, but there are still some hurdles. Now that Canonical has ported Ubuntu to the board, he expects RISC-V to become more convenient for developers and enterprises. This should address some of the platform’s issues.
According to the Ubuntu maker, the only reason the port was possible was because of long-term collaboration between Canonical, Allwinner, and Alibaba. The D1 SoC integrates Alibaba’s T-Head 64-bit chip, so collaboration with Alibaba was required too.
To be clear, the image that is available for the Nezha is Ubuntu Server, rather than the desktop image that most readers will be familiar with. Nevertheless, Ubuntu Server 22.04.1 LTS features very similar packages to what come installed on the desktop edition and is supported for the same length of time – until 2027.