Ubuntu Announces Official Support For The PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit RISC-V Board

Following work bringing Ubuntu Linux to the RISC-V boards like the StarFive VisionFive 2, LicheeRV, Nezha, and others, Canonical today announced they have published an optimized RISC-V image for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA powered "Icicle Kit" development board.

The PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit is a RISC-V developer board powered by this SoC FPGA that is powered by a SiFive E51 monitor core and four SiFive U54 application cores. This board has 2GB of LPDDR4 memory, 1Gb SPI flash, and 8 GB eMMC flash along with an SD card slot.

The Icicle Kit features four 12.7 Gbps SERDES interfaces, PCIe Gen2 root port, dual Gigabit Ethernet, two SPI, and a Raspberry Pi compatible 40-pin header. There is no display/graphics support.

The Icicle Kit has been advertised as being a "low-cost" development board but currently commands a $590 USD price-tag, which is out of reach to most enthusiasts / low-cost independent developers especially for what is going to be relatively lackluster performance.

Those interested in Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS support for the Icicle Kit can learn more via Ubuntu.com.

Upstream in the Linux kernel there has been Icicle Kit DT since Linux 5.13 along with other PolarFire SoC upstream work.