RISC-V is an open architecture standard that provides flexibility, and chip designers can add or remove instructions as they please to match their application requirements. That’s all great until complex software designed to run on multiple platforms is involved. That’s why for Linux and Android support, the RVA (RISC-V Application) profiles were created, so that every RISC-V SoC designed for those systems meets some minimal requirements and shared instructions, to which you would also add more if needed, as long as they don’t break the standard.
The RISC-V association ratified the latest RVA23 profile for 64-bit RISC-V in October 2024, which notably mandates support for the vector and hypervisor extensions. OMGUbuntu also reports that Canonical has decided to raise the required RISC-V ISA profile family to RVA23, or more exactly RVA23U64, from RVA20 for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release. In other words, going forward, Ubuntu will only be supported on newer hardware platforms, and incompatible systems running Ubuntu 24.04 won’t be able to upgrade.
Large projects always stop support for older hardware after a while, but Canonical may have been overly zealous here. Let’s have a look at the test plan from the commit:
Test that Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy can be upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 Noble on RVA20 hardware.
Test that Ubuntu 24.04 Noble cannot be upgraded to Plucky or Questing on RVA20 hardware.
Test that Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky cannot be upgraded to Questing on RVA20 hardware.
Test that Ubuntu 24.04 Noble can be upgraded to Questing on a RVA23 virtual machine.
Test that Ubuntu 24.04 Plucky can be upgraded to Questing on a RVA23 virtual machine.Test that Ubuntu 24.04 Plucky can be upgraded to Questing on an arm64 virtual machine.
QEMU 10.0 provides all RVA23U64 extensions.
Notice something odd. RVA20 was tested on hardware, and RVA23 was tested on a virtual machine. Why? That’s because RVA23-compliant is basically non-existent, as noted by Bruce Hoult on X:
… There are zero (0) RVA23 machines in the market at present. The spec was only ratified a few months ago.
Peter de Kraker also chimed in on the Launchpad “Bug” report linked above:
Yeah. Quite bummed that my orangepi rv2 would immediately become unsupported by newer Ubuntu versions. :(. I would understand this for 26.10 but now?? RVA22 seems much more sane and indeed as Laurent says, there is no hardware with rva23 currently?!
For reference, the “old” Orange Pi RV2 was released in March 2025, or about four months ago, it won’t support the latest Ubuntu release, making most exciting RISC-V boards obsolete, although some may also be compliant with RVA23, depending on the instructions implemented in the SoC. So you may have to switch to another Linux distribution if you want to run a recent Linux OS on a RISC-V board that does not meet the RVA23 Profile requirements.
Thanks to TLS for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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