Canonical Releases Fully-Certified Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Images for Qualcomm's Dragonwing Chips

Canonical has officially graduated its build of Ubuntu Linux for Qualcomm's Dragonwing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors out of beta, offering it in general availability for the first time.

"Our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies ensures that developers and manufacturers can now deploy certified Ubuntu with confidence," claims Canonical's Joe Dulin of the launch, "utilizing the full power of Qualcomm Dragonwing processors to build security-focused, high-performance, and intelligent edge solutions that will define the next era of industrial automation and enterprise efficiency."

"We are thrilled to see Canonical officially provide certified Ubuntu support for our Qualcomm Dragonwing platforms," adds Qualcomm's Manvinder Singh. "This collaboration simplifies development and deployment for our customers, enabling them to harness the immense potential of our QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors with a leading open source operating system. Developers can now prototype, test, and deploy edge AI [Artificial Intelligence] solutions faster – utilizing Ubuntu's tooling and Qualcomm Technologies' high-performance processors to push the boundaries of intelligent edge innovation."

Canonical announced its partnership with Qualcomm back in December last year, releasing beta builds of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux for the Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 Vision kit — a Dragonwing QCS6490-powered development board released in April that year. Today's announcement shifts from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to the newer Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, providing boot firmware and pre-compiled images for both the desktop and server variants.

The QCS6490 includes a Kryo 670 CPU complex with one high-performance Arm Cortex-A78 Kryo Gold Plus core running at up to 2.7GHz, three Cortex-A78 Kryo Gold cores running at up to 2.4GHz, and and four low-power Cortex-A55 Kryo Silver cores running at up to 1.9GHz, a sixth-generation Qualcomm AI Engine with Hexagon 770 tensor and scalar accelerators and vector processing extensions delivering up to 12 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute, an Adreno 643L graphics processor, and an Adreno 633 vision processing unit, plus tri-band Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 radios, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) support, and five camera inputs with an image processor.

These fully-certified images are provided for the Qualcomm Dragonwing RB3 Gen 2 and Gen 2 Lite Vision Development Kit boards, based on the QCS6490 and QCS5430 respectively; an uncertified "early release" is also provided for the Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ-9075 Evaluation Kit, with the promise of certification to follow. Interested parties can find all images on the Ubuntu Downloads site.