Ubuntu 22.10 Up And Running On The LicheeRV ~$19 RISC-V Board

In addition to supporting the SiFive HiFive Unmatched, Allwinner D1 Nezha, and VisionFive RISC-V board support, Canonical has formally announced Ubuntu 22.10 for the LicheeRV as a $16~19+ RISC-V board.

Back in September I wrote about Ubuntu 22.10 aiming to support the LicheeRV and indeed Canonical engineers managed to deliver in getting this low-cost RISC-V board working on the newest Ubuntu release.

The Sipeed LicheeRV is a compute module board with M.2 connector that can connect to a carrier board for additional connectivity. The Sipeed LicheeRV uses the Allwinner D1 SoC and is powered by a single-core XuanTie C906 64-bit RISC-V processor. This single-core RISC-V processor runs at just 1.0GHz. Yes, this is a very cheap but slow board. The LicheeRV is primarily for networking purposes and other IoT use-cases.

The LicheeRV launched at $16 while current pricing from AliExpress puts it at $19 and above.

This board isn't powerful enough for a RISC-V Linux desktop and also lacks in the connectivity department, but is an interesting board for hobbyists and others wanting to experiment with low-end RISC-V hardware.

Canonical today announced the Ubuntu 22.10 availability for the LicheeRV RISC-V board via the Ubuntu blog for more details.