Canonical is pursuing a rather ambitious baseline of 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 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 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.