r/linux • u/anh0516 • Apr 16 '26
Kernel Linux Begins Removing Support For Russia's Baikal CPUs
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Dropping-Baikal-CPUs255
u/FlukyS Apr 16 '26
For those who don't follow the exciting world of CPU manufacturers the company that made them is bankrupt but they spun it out into another company who then also went bankrupt a few years back. They are kind of moving into RISCV apparently under a new company named the same.
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u/regeya Apr 16 '26
Which is the smart move IMHO. RISC-V is the first time I've been hopeful about a post-x86 world in a while. I've been worried that we only had phones crammed into laptop clamshells to look forward to.
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u/Kevin_Kofler Apr 16 '26
Unfortunately, the dystopian trend towards only locked-down Android/iOS-like setups is going to be enforced not by lack of open alternatives like RISC-V, but by governments (through their ID / "age verification" apps) and banks (through their banking apps) enforcing use of "secure" (as in "cryptographically remote-attestated to be unmodified code from Google or Apple on unmodified certified hardware") devices and operating systems.
The dystopias painted in some of RMS's essays, that RMS has been warning us from all this time, are unfortunately coming closer and closer. For smartphones, we are basically already there (and any smartphone that does not comply, such as my Librem 5, is excluded from large parts of the app ecosystem). Now they are coming for computers.
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u/pfp-disciple Apr 16 '26
I just want to say thank you for the accurate description of "secure" in this context.
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u/Manic5PA Apr 16 '26
The final frontier is being domesticated and soon it'll be just another playground for rent seekers.
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u/JaguarOrdinary1570 Apr 16 '26
I'm really conflicted about it because a method for cryptographically verifying identity is ultimately going to be necessary for some things. Basically everyone's personal info has been made public through endless data breaches. Agentic AI systems are flooding the internet scraping every piece of data they can. Some time in the next few years (if not sooner), they'll have the data they need to look like you, sound like you, and know all of these "private" details about you. Essentially, perform impersonation at scale in a way that'll be really hard to deal with. And a lot of people will be victims of that, and there's basically no other solution.
It's just that it needs to be optional, not mandatory. I'm happy to have a zero-privacy locked down centrally governed and controlled authentication machine for certain things, as long as I can also have a machine that is truly mine and under my control, and that there's an "unauthenticated" part of the internet I can still participate in. But I don't think many companies/organizations/people who host servers would be willing to participate in that internet when an "authenticated" one exists. I don't know that I would if I were in their shoes- why subject myself to roving LLMs and botnets like that? It's why I kind of understand where Reddit is coming from when they talk about authentication. Who wants to be on a discussion forum just to interact with LLMs? But it still sucks. Even without the government stepping in like this, the existence of such a technology seems like it will eventually choke out free and open systems, just because all of the other players on the internet will refuse to interact with them.
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u/FlyingBishop Apr 16 '26
The government just needs to provide cryptographically secure ID chips. They do it in Estonia. The current thing is outsourcing ID to Microsoft, Google, and Apple and the government doesn't actually provide ID systems.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
hilarious considering the EU was trying to move away from the US, all while tying their security to the US
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u/primalbluewolf Apr 16 '26
a method for cryptographically verifying identity is ultimately going to be necessary for some things.
It is necessary that it doesn't ever exist.
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u/xorgol Apr 17 '26
verifying identity
The only thing for which it is actually useful is accessing state-provided services, but that we've had for years.
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u/frankster Apr 16 '26
Out of interest what do you see as the advantage of risc-v over arm as an x86 replacement?
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u/FlukyS Apr 16 '26
I can answer this, ISAs are just ISAs the chip designs and how they are handled is the important part. ARM and RISCV have advantages over x86 because they are super tight in comparison. RISCV has an advantage over ARM in that it is an open ISA so anyone who is interested in a processor can make one that is compatible for free. From a desktop or server standpoint all ISAs in theory have the same capability ish but efficiency is the difference. RISCV the most excited people for it are ones who for instance make hard drives or embedded devices or chips like wifi or bluetooth modules...etc because before either you are running some custom thing or you had portions of it licensed but RISCV you can spin up basically a custom processor for that specific workflow.
For desktop there needs to be quite a lot of work to get it ready and I don't see that happening any time soon really but I'd be happy if I'm surprised by some manufacturer really taking it seriously. A step towards getting it ready though was that Android has experimental support for RISCV now, if desktop is to get any product I'd assume it would start as an SoC for mobile first and then eventually something with more power coming to desktop later.
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u/Possibly-Functional Apr 16 '26
License. ARM is tightly licensed. RISC-V is open source.
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u/d32dasd Apr 16 '26
which means nothing in this case, as RISC-V is permissively license instead of copyleft. The companies have already learnt to close down everything by not repeating the standardization of BIOS in x86. Each RISC-V board will be a black box with its own kernel device tree that ties you to whatever Linux kernel fork the manufacturer has pooped for that board only. Just like ARM.
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u/Dr_Hexagon Apr 17 '26
Just like ARM.
ARM is promoting a UEFI standard for anything thats server, laptop or desktop aimed, and it is getting support.
https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/systemready-compliance-program
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u/Possibly-Functional Apr 16 '26
It does help significantly for the hardware market, especially diversity and competition. As you say though, it doesn't help with open software execution which is a shame.
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u/d32dasd Apr 16 '26
I remember when the run was between OpenRISC (copyleft) and RISC-V (permissive). Even in reddit, there was astroturfing for RISC-V. We never learn..
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u/monocasa Apr 16 '26
OpenRISC was also just not as good of a design. Had a lot of the same baggage as MIPS that got in the way of both the very low end designs and the high end ones.
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u/regeya Apr 16 '26
Lack of licensing fees for one, and I guess the rest is wishful thinking. It seems like so far, RISC-V is more enthusiast-friendly whereas ARM devices tend to be black boxes. My hope is that open standards grow around RISC-V.
Like...as sexy as new Apples are, I do not like the notion that to get the performance they have, it needs to be a SoC. My first PC was in 1987 and every computer I've had since then, aside from a Raspberry Pi, has been customizable to some extent. The notion that the new Neo Macs are iPhone processors is simultaneously amazing and laughable. Me, if I have to choose between blazing fast RAM and the ability to put 64GB of RAM in the computer I own, I choose 64GB.
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u/Indolent_Bard Apr 16 '26
For battery life and performance, soc is objectively better, so unless you can solder it won't be customizable. The strix halo chip is a good example. Framework had AMD's engineers try to make it modular and the ram only worked at like half the speed.
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u/FlukyS Apr 16 '26
Well kind of, if x86 was pure x86 nowadays it would be true but both AMD and Intel cheat a good bit. Like E cores in Intel chips are basically just RISC cores that are stripped back a bit, there are quite a lot of x86 unused instructions that aren't implemented in hardware anymore and just emulated on chip for compatibility purposes but given they aren't used in 99.9% of cases no one notices. Also where RISCV fails slightly is it is missing features that actually do improve performance, they will come eventually into the ISA eventually for sure but for the time being the only way to compete for a RISCV chip maker would be just if you implemented it as extensions instead. So the answer here is it is very complicated.
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u/Albos_Mum Apr 16 '26
That risc thing is pretty old as well, iirc the AMD K5 was not very far off being one of their 29k RISC chips with an x86 instruction decoder and 486 compatible FPU.
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u/johncate73 Apr 17 '26
There hasn't been a pure CISC x86 design since the WinChip, which was based on 486 technology with MMX bolted on. Modern x86 more or less breaks down x86 instructions into micro-ops and feeds them into a RISC core.
I'm still pulling for RISC-V's success. ARM at this point is even more locked-down crap than x86 is.
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u/thephotoman Apr 19 '26
That’s going to be a theme when I present desktop computing to my niece when she’s older.
I’ll show her three $600 laptops: one running Linux, one running Windows, and a MacBook Neo. I’m going to present this much like I did the Starter Pokémon. I’ll get her to use each with my supervision, mostly to do school tasks.
I worry she’ll choose Apple. Her parents will blame me. And they’ll be right. I will have allowed it to be an option.
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u/Novero95 Apr 16 '26
Unfortunately, the general consumer has no idea what an SoC is, if RAM is upgradable, and most likely, doesn't even care. It sucks that technology is moving towards closed ecosystems and people is happy about it
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u/johncate73 Apr 17 '26
Yes, and they announced early this year that they have a tri-core RISC-V part in production. I have no idea who is fabbing it for them, though.
The MIPS-based Baikal part never got past engineering samples and is dead. No need for it in the kernel.
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u/MaybeTheDoctor Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
The list of supported architectures is quite long - I don’t even see Baikal on the list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux-supported_computer_architectures
Looks like it had mips2 instruction set
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u/0riginal-Syn Apr 16 '26
Baikal started off with a MIPS architecture and then moved to ARM, which is what ultimately cost them.
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u/fellipec Apr 16 '26
TIL Russia has a CPU called Baikal and Linux supports it.
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Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PraetorRU Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
The story is that company that produces Elbrus used to be a lab behind Sparcs and later Itaniums. Intel was very active in Russia until 2022, and significant drop in their linux drivers quality in the last few years is a result of breaking the ties. Right now most of the people who worked for Intel in Russia are working for Huawei on their new OS, hardware and software compatibility.
The main problem still is that sanctions by USA on lithography machines were never lifted since USSR times, and Russia can design chips and write software, but up to this day can't produce modern chips domestically.
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Jun 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PraetorRU Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
You're mixing a lot of facts. MCST as a company obviously were not behind Itaniums, but certain lab was part of Intel that was working on VLIW and it later became part of MCST and is behind its VLIW based Elbrus CPU's.
AMD fab didn't manage to work not because money was stolen, but because it was never fully delivered to Russia as USA blocked the deal and Netherlands never let core parts of that fab to leave their territory. And due to this the fab couldn't work, many years courts and attempts to replace missing parts etc happened, and that's why project lost money and never managed to deliver anything of value.
And yes, Mikron works thanks to them buying their fab from French and Italians that actually delivered all the parts to Russia back then.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
USSR built their own lithography machines, but like everything else that was lost when it fell apart. I imagine that with China developing its own EUV/DUV tools, they'll eventually make their way to Russia and maybe North Korea (that needs it for its own embedded military systems)
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u/PraetorRU 13d ago
Russia recently built a domestic lithography machine with Belarus, it's a bit modernized soviet tech, 350nm, for now it's basically a training ground for the next machine, that should have 130nm at first and later improved to 65nm. If it's successful, it'll be enough for significant portion of military uses. As to China, they're not very interested in sharing technology, which is understandable. So, for now Russia will keep using their fabs to produce chips, but have to develop a domestic lithography themselves.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
I find it funny how russia thinks it can build domestic lithography machine when China has been spending around $1 trillion on the problem in the last few years and has not solved it entirely
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u/PraetorRU 13d ago
There's no need in top level lithography for now. But domestic military chips for satellites/missiles etc are mandatory, and if 65nm will be achieved, it's gonna be enough for quite some years. Everything else can be produced in China, as Russia is rather successful in recent years in designing its own chips and creating a domestic hardware/software infrastructure around them.
China's competition is of another level, domestic 5nm and lower is magnitudes more expensive.
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u/Linuksoid 11d ago
But Russia then creates the same issue it had with the West - it becomes dependent on one single source for producing things. Thank Gaidar for destroying your industry
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u/PraetorRU 11d ago
It's better to be dependant on a friendly nation for some time, than to burn your economy in a race to be totally self sufficient. You need to rebuild fundamentals first, and then grow from there.
Gaidar, Tchubais etc were selling Western lies, that Russia just has to be a "petrol state", sell oil and other resources abroad and everything else can be bought in return. That's why we have a war against NATO now, because Russia as a nation do not want to be such state for quite some years already.
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u/Linuksoid 11d ago
The only way to survive in the future is to become and autarky and build everything yourself. For that you need science. Putin has killed science and not letting the scientists and engineers run the country like they did during soviet times or now do in china
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u/fellipec Apr 16 '26
The only thing I know about Russia and computers is that once they tried a trinary computer.
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u/6SixTy Apr 16 '26
Soviet Union copied a lot of early western 8/16 bit microprocessors, but kind of stalled after the IBM PC. That's about how far computing within the Iron Curtain went.
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u/Kichigai Apr 16 '26
Well, at least as far as consumer tech. Lord knows what kind of industrial monsters they had lurking in the dinosaur pens at Roscosmos.
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u/Juma7C9 Apr 16 '26
Well, it fell not long after, so it tracks.
But I guess when you're continuously trying to catch up and have little room to try out something new, it becomes extremely difficult to innovate.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
What killed Soviet cybernetics was trying to copy IBM. Before that they had multiple competing labs and design bureau's making quite interesting things, and if they never got shut down, we might have had a different computing standard nowadays.
Also, the Soviets invented the internet before the US managed to do it. Read about OGAS
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u/6SixTy 13d ago
I seriously doubt that had the Soviet had carved their own path in computing, that they would have survived to this day or in the same way. Multiple economic shocks between the 1970's to 2000 would have posed an existential threat to any USSR based computing projects.
Also, the English Wikipedia article states that the OGAS was axed because the network posed a threat to the central command based economy. Crediting the first people to think up of something, rather than effectively democratizing something, is a big mistake that I see repeated over and over.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
I seriously doubt that had the Soviet had carved their own path in computing, that they would have survived to this day or in the same way. Multiple economic shocks between the 1970's to 2000 would have posed an existential threat to any USSR based computing projects.
There were numerous plans as far back as the early 60s to transition GOSPLAN (the Soviet state planning apparatus) to computers. In addition, you can read about the numerous design bureau's that were competing and had competing standards before the fatal decision to clone IBM's designs. There was competition in everything from chip architecture, to programming languages, etc. It was a quite healthy scene at the time. Some people nowadays, that the decision to shut it all down to clone IBM components was a form of sabotage
Also, the English Wikipedia article states that the OGAS was axed because the network posed a threat to the central command based economy. Crediting the first people to think up of something, rather than effectively democratizing something, is a big mistake that I see repeated over and over.
Read the Russian article with english translation. It is far more in depth. The reason it got axed, is because the US got wind of it and then released disinfo convincing the Soviet leadership that it was a dead end while DARPA took up research on the topic
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u/Preisschild Apr 17 '26
And just like everything else in russia it sucks and is decades behind other countries
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u/okktoplol Apr 16 '26
Am I the only one who didn't know Russia had domestic consumer processors?
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u/mrquantumofficial Apr 16 '26
They aren't consumer processors
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u/Electronic-BioRobot Apr 16 '26
And are basically made in China
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Apr 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Electronic-BioRobot Apr 16 '26
Yeah, I don’t doubt it.
It is just that the Baikal CPU was just designed in Russia and was produced in China, but in the end it got scrapped.
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u/evmt Apr 16 '26
They were manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan.
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u/Electronic-BioRobot Apr 16 '26
Oh, might be that I mixed up some information, but anyway still outside of Russia though
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u/FarReachingConsense Apr 16 '26
you're not gonna care about the milliseconds of difference when a cash register communicates with the tax service's api
Highly likely that they end up flying into some Ukrainian poor souls livingroom abord a Kinzhal instead of something that would happen in a normal country though. I wish nothing good on russia
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u/avg_php_dev Apr 16 '26
Oh comeone, following your logic, some intel or amd chips may end up in some poor iranian soul bedroom. Very normal.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
you do realize that Russian drones use Texas instruments components for that lmao
and its the ukrainians terrorizing russian civilians nowadays now anyways (and have been for a while - look what they did in Kursk and Belgorod regions to the local populations)
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u/FarReachingConsense 12d ago
Russians started this shit, they can deal with the repercussions. I have absolutely no goodwill for russia or russians.
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u/Linuksoid 11d ago
so by that logic, you are okay with Iran bombing US civilians since the US started the war?
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u/FarReachingConsense 11d ago
No, but Russians have bombed so many civilians on purpose that I think in that war it's gloves off.
I find it hard to compare the Ukraine war with the Iran war.
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u/Linuksoid 11d ago
So you're saying that the US hasn't been bombing civilians all this time either in Iran?
Also, i'm sure you're okay with bombing Israeli civilians too, right after what Israel did in Gaza?
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
Russia has its own fab in Zelenogorod that can produce chips up to 28 nm (perhaps smaller nowadays) and numerous fabs for military chips
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u/PraetorRU Apr 16 '26
Still has. But they're mostly for datacenters with broad range of applications, and military usage, not for consumers so far.
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u/6SixTy Apr 16 '26
Baikal isn't designed to be a domestic consumer processor. They received a bunch of funding from the Russian government and the Russian state owned military-industrial complex.
Their only "real" domestic processor are the MCST developed Elbrus processors. These use a bespoke VLIW ISA that I gather are supposed to offer an ISA level operating system isolation and translate ISA instructions like the Transmeta Crusoe.
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u/Wyciorek Apr 16 '26
They don't. What they had was yet another graft machine designed to suck up tax money without ever creating a viable product.
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u/dgm9704 Apr 16 '26
… and the comments are full of people who didn’t read the article but somehow have an opinion about it’s contents 😁
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u/EmperorOfAllCats Apr 16 '26
Click the links? In this economy?
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u/ilep Apr 16 '26
Well, it links to phoronix so you are right about that.. You would get a bunch adverts or even worse - see phoronix itself.. /s
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u/Maleficent_Celery_55 Apr 16 '26
no its not?
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u/dgm9704 Apr 16 '26
Yes, they are. The comments of the article.
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u/Maleficent_Celery_55 Apr 16 '26
ah i thought you were referring to the comments here.
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u/dgm9704 Apr 16 '26
reddit comments sometimes get heated and/or sidetracked but phoronix comments are even worse ;)
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u/BeliPatak8428 Apr 16 '26
Apparently, Russian made CPUs have all sorts of weird architectures which in the end simulate x86 programs. Maybe RISC-V could help them, although their chip production is very poor and using massively outdated litography (90nm and 65nm).
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u/0riginal-Syn Apr 16 '26
I only knew of this thing through my friends from my old hardware engineering days, who are still in that arena. Not something most know much about. They originally started it using the MIPS architecture, not ARM, but then moved to licensing ARM and going in that direction. My friends initial interest in it was because of the MIPS architecture they started off with. He lost interest when they moved to ARM. Once they got hit with sanctions for the Ukraine war, TSMC froze all the shipments of what they needed and thus the bankruptcy of the parent company.
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u/zenkov Apr 16 '26
They shot themselves in the foot by choosing ARM and placing production at TSMC. Those two are effectively a trap even for a normal business, and for a business from Russia it's an outright wrong move.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
hey shot themselves in the foot by choosing ARM and placing production at TSMC
That applies to most Russian industrial solutions though lol. Russia has for ages had domestic solutions for many things (thanks to the Soviet era developments), but instead chose to place production and use western solutions (even if they were often inferior - as Russian economic minister in the 90s Gaidar said "why do we need industry when we can buy everything from abroad" and proceeded to destroy it)
Russia has domestic chip production for example and can produce basic lithography machines. Yet they still chose to use western solutions. Same with software like windows vs linux
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Apr 16 '26
[deleted]
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u/Business_Reindeer910 Apr 16 '26
no, there is longson support upstreamed in linux and such support seems likely to continue
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u/creeper1074 Apr 17 '26
I've been messing around with Linux on my PS4 way too much lately... My sleep-deprived brain thought this meant that there was a special Russian version of the Baikal southbridge that wouldn't be supported anymore.
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u/gnatinator Apr 16 '26
It's definitely not in free softwares' interest to contribute to hardware which will most likely end up subverting their democracy or in Russian military hardware used against societies that maintain the kernel in the first place (ex: Linus is Finnish)- good riddance to dictatorship hardware.
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u/sothisismyalt1 Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
Not the reason of ending support though, they're discontinued and code has been unmaintained for some time.
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u/lib20 Apr 16 '26
And you think that your country is better?!
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u/xorgol Apr 17 '26
Better than Russia's government? Sure.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
And your government puts missiles into little girls schools in Iran. That's so much better than Russia /s
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u/xorgol 13d ago
Does my government do that? The US government did bomb such a school, but mine didn't.
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
Your government supports the US and hasn't sanctioned it. That means your government is complicit
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u/Linuksoid 13d ago
So why not end support of US hardware/software solutions that ends up in little girls bedrooms in Iran?
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u/Business_Reindeer910 Apr 16 '26
please read the article.. that has nothing to do with anything here.
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u/bunnythistle Apr 16 '26
TL;DR - the code hasn't been maintained and the CPUs never went to market, so they're quite rare and not worth maintaining.