Ubuntu 25.10 Raises RISC-V Profile Requirements

RVA23 is actually a decent ISA for linux machines for the long term, RVA20 was not.

Presumably there's going to be some hardware releases later this year that Ubuntu has early knowledge of.

Does this line up with what riscv android will also require?

Seems unlikely.

>Does this line up with what riscv android will also require?

AIUI both Google and Microsoft selected RVA23 as baseline.

> RVA23 is actually a decent ISA for linux machines for the long term, RVA20 was not.

This is setting it all up to happen again with whatever is found to be wrong with RVA23.

RVA20 was missing generally expected features, RVA23 isnt

RVA30 is N+1, presumably we wont see shipping devices for that until the early 2030s

> that Ubuntu has early knowledge of.

They aren’t big enough to get advance notice of hardware from any serious SoC makers. So I bet not.

Google quote from https://riscv.org/riscv-news/2024/10/risc-v-announces-ratifi...

> "Google is delighted to see the ratification of the RVA23 Profile," said Lars Bergstrom, Director of Engineering, Google. "This profile has been the result of a broad industry collaboration, and is now the baseline requirement for the Android RISC-V Application Binary Interface (ABI)."

Yeah, the RISC-V community itself didn't see it as sufficient to build a competitive chip with until RVA23. The relevant milestones have been worked on for years. A LOT of effort was spent to get them right because ISA standards are hard to undo.

RISC-V has been perfectly suitable for embedded use and RISC-V is killing in that market.

But none of the Linux capable hardware produced up to this point has been competitive with existing alternatives. No one was seriously thinking that the OrangePi was a better value than an RPi.

These computers were primarily useful as dev boards to start porting software. The manufacturers are trying to scale manufacturing and establish market share, not turn a big profit. They knew their v1 hardware would be buggy and short lived. The CPUs themselves have been busy speed running the complexity levels that ARM and x86 had decades to develop.