Back in June it was announced by Canonical that for the Ubuntu 25.10 release they would be raising the RISC-V baseline to the RVA23 profile even with barely any available RISC-V platforms supporting that newer RISC-V profile. That change is still going ahead and leaves Ubuntu 25.10 on RISC-V currently only supporting the QEMU virtualized target.
Ubuntu 25.10 and beyond mandates the RISC-V RVA23 profile even with a lack of RISC-V platforms currently supporting that specification, which mandates scalable vector support and other features. Existing RISC-V hardware support is basically relegated to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 25.04 for a non-LTS release with more recent packages, or using alternative RISC-V Linux distributions.
In an Ubuntu Discourse post today, it was reaffirmed that just QEMU is basically supported by Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V… In the Ubuntu 25.10 Foundations Edition post it was commented about the RISC-V RVA23 requirement:
“Upcoming hardware for RISC-V targets the RVA23S64 ISA profile which brings a lot of new exciting features to RISC-V. The mandatory set includes for instance scalable vector support and pointer masking which will both help to bring the architecture to an execution speed comparable to ARM and x86. Optional extensions include control flow integrity and vector crypto support.
We therefore raised the baseline for the 25.10 to RVA23 release at the start of the month. A rebuild of main showed only a very low number of issues coming up. Two bugs in GCC were fixed by upstream maintainers. QEMU emulation on s390x still has an endian issue. We plan for a whole archive rebuild in the 26.04 cycle.
How to enable RVA23 support for compiled languages other than C and C++ is under investigation.
As RVA23 hardware is not yet on the market currently QEMU is the only supported platform in the 25.10 release. Existing hardware will continue to be supported in the 24.04 LTS release.”
Plus a screenshot of RISC-V RVA23 Ubuntu 25.10 usage in a virtualized environmen:
It’s possible later on as RVA23 hardware becomes available Canonical could release new RISC-V images catering toward particular platforms / single board computers, but chances are by the time more RVA23 hardware is out in the wild, it will be onto Ubuntu 26.04 LTS time.
