Canonical put out a new blog post today highlighting their RISC-V work over 2025 that included switching to the RVA23 profile baseline for Ubuntu 25.10 and moving forward. Now with RVA23-compatible RISC-V hardware coming to market this year, Canonical is talking up the RISC-V possibilities when paired with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.
With Canonical having shifted Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V requirements to RVA23, it limited the support to basically RISC-V on QEMU. But this year RVA23 compliant RISC-V SoCs are coming to market with the likes of the SpacemiT K3 and thus Canonical talking up the new possibilities for Ubuntu on RISC-V.
Canonical summed up the Ubuntu RISC-V 2026 plans as:
“If 2025 was all about readiness, 2026 will be about scale. More RISC-V systems will move from labs and pilots into commercial products, from cloud to edge, and Canonical is ready to enable our partners and customers to leverage the best of open source technology and run it seamlessly on RISC-V.
Key focus areas for us at Canonical will be:
– Building on our partnership work: we’ll deepen our existing collaborations and onboarding a broader range of hardware vendors to bring Ubuntu to the next generation of RISC-V platforms.
– Closing the product parity gap: we’ll ensure the additional Canonical portfolio, from cloud-native tools to IoT products runs as seamlessly on RISC-V.
– Delivering Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with RVA23 as our unified, long-term supported baseline, providing a stable platform for vendors moving from labs to commercial production.
– Maintaining leadership in standards alignment and upstream enablement: we’ll work to ensure new silicon capabilities are immediately accessible to the open-source community.
– Empowering the developer community: we’ll continue to partner with SBC partners to make Ubuntu the go-to platform with an amazing out-of-the-box experience for RISC-V development.
RISC-V’s promise has always been about openness, choice and long-term innovation. Canonical is proud to play a long-term role as a builder, collaborator and steward of the RISC-V ecosystem. Ensuring Ubuntu remains the foundation on which RISC-V systems, solutions and products can scale.”
Those wanting to learn more can see the new post on the Ubuntu blog.
