Source: OSNews
Article note: The RISC-V ecosystem continues to be an absolute shitshow of unforced errors. The high-level concept is appealing, but the hype is routinely exceeding the reality, by an ever growing amount. No available RVA23 hardware, no available RVV1.0 hardware (spec ratified in 2021). I suspect the RVV situation is because they made some decisions that impose a hilarious amount of complexity on the execution unit - which is what makes it both interesting and suspect.
A recent bug report filed against Ubuntu’s upgrading tool confirmed a major change with regards to the RISC-V requirements for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release — most existing RISC-V devices will not be able to run Ubuntu 25.10.
How come?
↫ Joey Sneddon at omgubuntu.co.uk
RISC-V just isn’t delivering. That’s the cold and harsh truth more and more people are having to deal with, such as Chimera Linux dropping RISC-V support because the ecosystem is simply lacking the kind of powerful and available hardware to sustain itself (Chimera got lucky, though, and gained access to a Milk-V Pioneer through Adélie Linux). The number of systems and boards that are both powerful and available is close enough to zero that it might as well be zero, and if neither users nor developers can buy RISC-V hardware, what’s the point in supporting it?
The issue for Ubuntu specifically is that version 25.10 of the distribution intends to target only the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile, while currently Ubuntu supports RVA20 as the baseline. This higher baseline profile requires a number of extensions to the instruction set that no existing hardware yet supports, making 25.10 effectively a clean break for all existing RISC-V hardware. In other words, if you’re running Ubuntu on RISC-V hardware today, you won’t be able to upgrade to 25.10 or higher.
RISC-V really needs vastly improved hardware availability, because right now it’s just not delivering on the years of promises.