Canonical engineer Matthieu Clemenceau has posted a status update on the behalf of the Ubuntu Foundations engineers now half-way through the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle. A number of notable package updates have landed as well as continued work on better ARM64 support and coming to a decision over “-O3” optimized packages.
When it comes to some notable software updates for Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical engineers have landed Glibc 2.41, systemd 257.2, and OpenSSL 3.4.1 among the notable version bumps. Ubuntu 25.04 is continuing to use GCC 14 by default while some other notable toolchain versions include going with Python 3.13 for Ubuntu 25.04 and OpenJDK Java 21. There is also Golang 1.24, Rust 1.84, Microsoft .NET 9, and LLVM 20.
As noted already, Ubuntu 25.04 will support Dracut as an alternative to initramfs-tools but Ubuntu Linux won’t be using Dracut by default until Ubuntu 25.10 in October.
Canonical engineers also continue working on crypto-config for system-wide configuration profiles around cryptography settings.
Ubuntu 25.04 also is seeing more work on the ARM64 side, especially with the continued efforts around Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 laptop support by Ubuntu Linux. There’s been more improvements on the Snapdragon X1 support and they continue toward the quest of being able to have one Ubuntu ARM64 ISO that would work from these new laptops to ARM64 servers and more:
“We remain committed to our goal to keep Ubuntu beginner friendly and accessible for everyone so we are breaking with today’s arm64 default of device-specific installers and images. Instead we will provide a single official Ubuntu arm64 desktop ISO that just works, be it on an Ampere powered workstation a Snapdragon Laptop or even in a virtual machine on your Apple Silicon Mac.”
Canonical also has been investing in improvements for their .NET Snap for those wanting to Microsoft .NET on ubuntu.
Canonical engineers had been exploring using the “-O3” compiler optimization level by default for building Ubuntu packages. But they have now decided they will revert the change and go back to -O2… The reason being they found “some workloads saw improvements, overall system performance slightly declined, and binary sizes increased.” So -O3 isn’t paying off in the Ubuntu packaging world for now and will be reverted soon.
Canonical also has been experimenting with LLVM/Clang based builds as an alternative to using GCC, but they found around 12% of the packages failing to build for at least one of the supported Ubuntu Linux architectures. At this stage it would be far from trivial for Ubuntu to switch to LLVM/Clang by default.
More details on these Ubuntu Foundations happenings via this Ubuntu Discourse post.
