Ubuntu 25.10 Raises RISC-V Profile Requirements

Summary

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.” Per Samsung, the RISC-V ‘V’ Vector extension “allows CPUs to perform many operations simultaneously, making them faster and more efficient”. With RVA23 RISC-V reaches a clear feature parity level with ARMv9 and x86-64v4. It is (naturally) more involved than that. Plenty of deep-dives on RISC-V Vector ...