News: 0001569541

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Ubuntu 25.10 Continues Preparing For RISC-V RVA23 Baseline Requirement

([Ubuntu] 3 Hours Ago RISC-V RVA23)


Canonical is pursuing a rather ambitious baseline of [1]Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V too require the RVA23 profile that will leave most existing RISC-V developer boards to using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Ubuntu 25.04. They continue to pursue this RISC-V baseline and with more of the necessary alterations for it being prepped for landing into the Ubuntu 25.10 archive.

It looks like Canonical isn't backing down from their plans to mandate the RVA23 profile for Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V even though it will prevent most existing RISC-V users from upgrading. The release upgrade changes to [2]check foor RVA23 compatibility have since landed in the relevant repositories.

Over the past week there have also been more compiler toolchain preparations in going all-in on RVA23. Ubuntu developer Heinrich Schuchardt wrote in this week's [3]update :

GCC

- Building for RISC-V RVA23 has been tested in a test archive with support by @ginggs.

- GCC 15.2 with RVA23 default has been uploaded with support by @doko.

LLVM

- LLVM 20 with RVA23 default has been uploaded. There are unrelated build issues on arm64 and amd64.

The RISC-V RVA23 profile mandates Vector Extension support as well as the Hypervisor Extension. This shift to an RVA23 baseline while sharply limiting the current RISC-V boards supported is likely to allow sufficient time for testing ahead of the very important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-25.10-To-Require-RVA23

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/2111715

[3] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/foundations-team-updates-2025-08-14/66154


CommunityMember

So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark].
With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to
maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of
corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to
flop up onto the land and evolve. Richard and I were inching toward
it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and --
I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in
the armpit area -- headed right straight toward us.
Many people would have panicked at this point. But Richard and
I were not "many people." We were experienced waders, and we kept our
heads. We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you're
unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water
up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the
opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of
our feet never once went below the surface of the water. We ran all
the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers
cartoon we would have run right INTO the beach, and you would have seen
these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked
into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads.
-- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"