Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year.
Canonical developers are planning for Ubuntu 25.10 to raise the required RISC-V ISA profile baseline to RVA23 that was ratified last year.
The RISC-V RVA23 Profile makes mandatory the RISC-V Vector extension, the Hypervisor extension, and other modernization/standardization work for the RISC-V ecosystem. This change though will mean that older RISC-V platforms lacking RVA23 compatibility will no longer be supported by new Ubuntu Linux releases but will need to stay on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Ubuntu 25.04 as the newest post-LTS version prior to 25.10.
Confirmation of Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V planning to mandate RVA23 profile support was confirmed with this ubuntu-release-upgrader ticket:
“For Ubuntu 25.10 release we plan to raise the required RISC-V ISA profile family to RVA23.
The ubuntu-release-upgrader should stop upgrades beyond Ubuntu 24.04 on hardware that does not support the RVA23U64 profile. RVA23U64 [1] is the profile relevant for user space.
As there is no upgrade path from Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky for RVA20 systems, we should also stop upgrading these RISC-V systems from Noble to Plucky.”
Those ubuntu-release-upgrader updates are beginning to roll-out for ensuring Ubuntu RISC-V users are running on hardware with RVA23 compatibility otherwise holding back on upgrades.
