Canonical
Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu operating system now supports two SiFive RISC-V cards: HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched. We recall that recently Intel, according to Bloomberg, would have offered 2 billion dollars to SiFive for its acquisition, as well as confirming that it will produce SiFive chips and revealing its plans to incorporate the new SiFive P550 processors into its Horse Creek platforms produced at 7nm. br>The commercialization of HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched predates these announcements and, moreover, HiFive Unleashed is no longer in production. Those interested in testing Ubuntu's capabilities on the RISC-V architecture will therefore have to fall back on HiFive Unmatched.
Canonical said:
The availability of Ubuntu running on HiFive cards is the result of the joint work between the Canonical and SiFive engineering teams. The Canonical team is committed to porting Ubuntu to HiFive cards, supported by the SiFive engineering team, as part of a long-term collaboration between the two companies.
Canonical added that “RISC-V has a great potential and is becoming a competitive ISA in multiple markets ”and, for this reason,“ bringing Ubuntu to RISC-V to become the operating system of reference for the first users was a necessary choice ”. The agreement should make SiFive (and therefore RISC-V) products more accessible to many people. Ubuntu may not be everyone's favorite Linux distro, but it is stable and is an established operating system.
There are currently three Ubuntu images available for SiFive customers. HiFive Unleashed supports the current Ubuntu 21.04 release and Ubuntu 20.04 Long Term Support (LTS) variant, while HiFive Unmatched can only run Ubuntu 21.04.
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Canonical Partners With Blender Around Paid LTS Application Support
Ubuntu maker Canonical has partnered up with the Blender Foundation to offer paid enterprise support around the long-term support versions of Blender.In an interesting move for Canonical that is normally focused on offering LTS/enterprise support around their Linux distribution, the company is now offering paid enterprise support for Blender's LTS releases. Canonical's Blender LTS support extends beyond just Blender-on-Ubuntu to also include other Linux distributions as well as macOS and Windows.
The initial enterprise plans by Canonical for Blender include standard 24x5 support at $500 USD per year or 24x7 advanced coverage for $1,000 per year.
More details on Canonical's Blender LTS support via Ubuntu.com.