Canonical is bullish in promoting Ubuntu for RISC-V devices, be it enthusiast-orientated hardware like DeepComputing’s RISC-V tablet, single-board computers, or embedded equipment.
But with a new long-term support (LTS) release looming, it’s rethinking the kind of RISC-V hardware it wants to support going forward.
A recent bug report filed against Ubuntu’s upgrading tool confirmed a major change with regards to the RISC-V requirements for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release — most existing RISC-V devices will not be able to run Ubuntu 25.10.
How come?
A New Baseline for RISC-V
Ubuntu 25.10 plans to bumps its baseline RISC-V profile (RVA) from RVA20 to RVA23. It may sound like a small jump but it has a big impact since the bulk of RISC-V devices currently sold don’t support it.
An RVA (RISC-V Application) profile is a specification that outlines the vector processing capabilities a RISC-V system must have, so “software can rely on the existence of a certain set of […] features in a particular generation of RISC-V implementations”.
That’s according to RISC-V International, the main collaborative group steering and overseeing development of this open source and royalty free processor architecture.
“RISC-V was designed to provide a highly modular and extensible instruction set (ISA) and includes a large and growing set of standard extensions, where each standard extension is a bundle of instruction-set features,” RISC-V International explains.
The RVA23 profile makes a number of ‘extensions’ mandatory, notably Vector and Hypervisor extensions to power “math-intensive workloads including AI/ML & cryptography, and enterprise hardware, operating systems and software workloads.”
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