Announcement: NCZ OS 26.6 (r113) — Reinhardt + Magnetar in one ISO, Mesa 26.1.3 GPU compute + validated NPU embeddings on Sky1

[perlowja]

Hi Sky1-Linux folks 👋

Follow-up to #29 (NCZ 26.5 "Reinhardt"): we just shipped NCZ OS 26.6 — the first full release that folds Reinhardt (XFCE desktop) and Magnetar (headless server / always-on agent appliance) into a single ISO (pick the variant at the GRUB menu), targeting Cix Sky1 / CP8180.

What's new since 26.5:

• Mesa 26.1.3 GPU compute — stock Sky1 Mesa 26.0.3 panvk couldn't run GPU compute (VK_ERROR_OUT_OF_DEVICE_MEMORY, a 16-entry storage-buffer cap) and shipped no GPU OpenCL. We built 26.1.3 from source on the board: panvk Vulkan + rusticl OpenCL restored, A/B-validated +20.6% prefill / +12.9% decode (llama.cpp Vulkan), rusticl FP16 ~3.6 TFLOPS.
• Validated Zhouyi V3 NPU embeddings — bge-small-zh-v1.5 INT8 via cix-noe-umd 2.0.2 / libnoe, ~51 emb/s, with the .cix model committed to the repo so it can't be lost on reinstall.
• A/B kernel program — 6.18 LTS default + 7.0.12 edge, side-by-side.
• Bilingual docs (EN + 简体中文): a full AI/ML stack reference and an engineering post-mortem.

Honest hardware status: validated on Minisforum MS-R1 only. Radxa Orion O6 (same SoC, different board), Framework, and Orange Pi are untested — we need testers and ideally a board.

Your work — sky1-firmware, mesa-sky1, linux-sky1, the broader BSP — remains load-bearing here; credits point back to your repos.

• Release (ISO + sha256 + notes): https://gitlab.com/ncz-os/cix-installer/-/releases/v26.6
• GitHub mirror release: https://github.com/ncz-os/cix-installer/releases/tag/v26.6
• Source: https://gitlab.com/ncz-os/cix-installer

If NCZ surfaces any Sky1-side regressions or fixes worth flowing back, ping me here. Happy to file kernel issues upstream.

— Jason Perlow

[coffnix]

yo @perlowja good work!

Would you be able to share the patches required to build kernel 7.0.12, as well as the patches needed to build Mesa 26.1.3 with the updated Sky1 patches?

If possible, could you publish them on GitHub as forks of the official repositories:

https://github.com/Sky1-Linux/linux-sky1/

and

https://github.com/Sky1-Linux/mesa-sky1

That way I can build everything here on my Orange Pi 6 Plus and provide you with feedback on the results.

[perlowja]

Hey @coffnix — thanks, glad it's useful! 🙏

Rather than a loose patch series, I've published the full source trees with all the Sky1 drivers + NCZ patches applied inline, so you can just unpack and build on your O6 (no separate git am step). Both are forks under our org:

Kernel — 7.0.12 cix-sky1

Repo: https://github.com/ncz-os/linux-sky1
Source: https://github.com/ncz-os/linux-sky1/releases/download/v26.6-src/linux-7.0.12-cix-sky1-ncz-src.tar.gz

tar xzf linux-7.0.12-cix-sky1-ncz-src.tar.gz && cd linux-7.0.12-cix-sky1-ncz
make ARCH=arm64 CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- olddefconfig
make ARCH=arm64 CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- -j$(nproc) Image modules dtbs

Includes arm64 Sky1 DTs, PCIe, display (DPU/DPTX), panthor GPU, audio DSP+HDA, Zhouyi V3 NPU (armchina), VPU, irqchip/iommu/perf, thermal/PWM/watchdog. We boot the MS-R1 via ACPI; the O6 uses its own device tree (sky1-orion-o6), so build dtbs and point your bootloader at the O6 dtb.

Mesa 26.1.3 — panvk (Vulkan) + rusticl (OpenCL)

Repo: https://github.com/ncz-os/mesa-sky1
Source: https://github.com/ncz-os/mesa-sky1/releases/download/v26.6-src/mesa-26.1.3-cix-sky1-ncz-src.tar.gz

tar xzf mesa-26.1.3-cix-sky1-ncz-src.tar.gz && cd mesa-26.1.3
meson setup build-ncz -Dprefix=/opt/mesa-26.1.3 -Dgallium-drivers=panfrost,zink \
  -Dvulkan-drivers=panfrost -Dgallium-rusticl=true -Dbuildtype=release
ninja -C build-ncz install

A couple of notes:

• These are forks of Sky1-Linux/* under ncz-os (we don't have push to Sky1-Linux directly) — happy to send the deltas upstream if the maintainers want them.
• Heads-up on 7.1: we're rebasing the Sky1 stack onto the v7.1 stable tag now, but GPU/display on 7.1 still hits a panthor core-clock binding issue (get core clock failed -ENOENT → no /dev/dri yet), so 7.0.12 is the solid track today.

Would love to hear how it builds + boots on the O6 — especially display and NPU. 🙏