China's Kylin Linux targets second RISC-V platform

China's military-derived and government-approved Linux distribution, Ubuntu Kylin, has revealed plans to target a second RISC-V platform. Ubuntu Kylin is Ubuntu’s official version for China and was developed in partnership with Chinese authorities, including the military. In March 2022, a version of the OS was released for …

[3arn0wl]

Should've chosen Ubuntu Touch.

They could've saved themselves time and effort by porting UBPorts' Lomiri - a lightweight morphing OS suitable for desk/laptops and smartphones. :/

There's a lot of work going on at the moment with rebasing apps for RISC-V : https://lists.riscv.org/g/software/message/174

I thought Firefox and Chromium had already been done...

[Pascal Monett]

"developed in partnership with Chinese authorities"

AKA : it has state surveillance baked in.

[fg_swe]

You Mean

..they have a "Management's Engine" built-in ?

An "engine" which can never been totally turned off, has exploitable bugs, cannot be updated by users and has total control of the computer ?

[EnviableOne]

Re: You Mean

just like redmonds own basic or full telemetry options (not no none)

[thames]

But it may be good enough.

El Reg said: "... but at the time of writing also cannot match the performance of Intel's or AMD's finest – and will struggle to do so within China's two-year PC replacement deadline.but at the time of writing also cannot match the performance of Intel's or AMD's finest – and will struggle to do so within China's two-year PC replacement deadline.

RISC-V doesn't need to match the performance of "Intel's or AMD's finest" in order to replace PC's on the desks of bureaucrats. Said bureaucrats don't get PCs with top end CPUs to begin with. RISC-V only needs to have acceptable performance at an acceptable price.

I used a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop PC for a day while my regular PC was broken. Performance was perfectly acceptable for all tasks except for watching Youtube video full screen, where performance was barely adequate. That was probably more down to the GPU than the CPU however.

Take a RISC-V CPU that is the equivalent of the ARM CPU used in a Raspberry Pi 4, add a better GPU, and the end result is probably more than good enough for routine desktop office use.