Canonical has announced the start of separate system imaging of Ubuntu Core 20 and Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 distributions optimized for the 11th generation of Intel Core processors (Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake), Intel Atom X6000E chips, and the N and J series of Intel Celeron and Intel Pentium. The reason for creating separate builds is the desire to improve the efficiency of using Ubuntu in Internet of Things (IoT) systems built on Intel chips.
Of the features of the proposed assemblies, it is noted:
- Optimized for real-time tasks.
- Inclusion of patches to improve security and reliability (involved new features of the CPU to strengthen the isolation of containers and ensure integrity).
- Porting changes from recent Linux kernel branches to improve EDAC, USB, and GPIO support on systems with Intel Core Elkhart Lake and Tiger Lake-U CPUs.
- A driver has been added to support TCC (Time Coordinated Computing) technology, and support for TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking) controllers provided by Intel Core Elkhart Lake "GRE" and Tiger Lake-U RE and FE CPUs has been integrated to improve the performance of sensitive applications. delays in data processing and delivery.
- Improved support for the Intel Management Engine and MEI (Intel Management Engine Interface). The Intel ME environment runs on a separate microprocessor and is aimed at performing tasks such as processing protected content (DRM), implementing Trusted Platform Module (TPM) modules, and low-level interfaces for monitoring and controlling equipment.
- Support for Aaeon PICO-EHL4 Pico-ITX SBC boards with processors based on Elkhart Lake microarchitecture.
- For Elkhart Lake chips, the ishtp (VNIC) driver has been implemented, support for the graphics subsystem and the QEP (Quadrature Encoder Peripheral) driver have been added.
In addition, Canonical has released standalone builds of Ubuntu Server 21.10 for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board and has also promised to release Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 and Ubuntu Core 20 builds for it soon.
Source: opennet.ru