Canonical sets out Ubuntu's RISC-V roadmap at Hot Chips 2026 as RVA23 servers approach
Ninety-five percent of packages build on RISC-V but only 55 percent pass tests, a gap that explains what enterprise readiness really means.
Canonical used a session at Hot Chips 2026 to set out where Ubuntu stands on RISC-V and what it expects from the architecture as server-class hardware arrives. The talk was given by Gordan Markuš, Canonical's director of silicon alliances, and was covered by ServeTheHome on 7 September 2026.
Markuš described how Ubuntu is assembled: roughly 30,000 packages in the Universe archive and about 3,000 in Main, the latter carrying up to 15 years of support under Ubuntu Pro, plus a portfolio of kernels tuned for hyperscaler and silicon partners. The guiding principle, as he put it, is that an Ubuntu system should behave like an Ubuntu system regardless of the processor underneath.
On RISC-V specifically, Ubuntu 25.10 moved its riscv64 baseline from the RVA20 profile to RVA23, the standardised application profile for 64-bit processors that requires vector operations, hypervisor support and bit-manipulation extensions. The same release introduced architecture variants, along the lines of amd64v3 for the x86-64-v3 microarchitecture level. Canonical expects server-class RVA23 hardware from multiple vendors in 2026 and 2027, and named Scaleway Elastic Metal, Alibaba and SpacemiT among the platforms it works with.
The software picture is still uneven. About 95 percent of packages are available on RISC-V compared with amd64, but on Ubuntu 26.10 only 1,898 of 3,443 tested packages pass their tests, a 55.1 percent rate against roughly 92 percent on amd64. Snap support was described as a work in progress. Canonical Kubernetes and MicroCloud are being ported, and Canonical participates in the RISE project alongside RISC-V International. Native RISC-V build runners hosted at Scaleway have handled 24,000 jobs and 700,000 minutes across 116 organisations. Markuš drew a parallel with Arm, where Ubuntu added arm64 in 2011 but the 16.04 LTS release was the point at which Arm servers became practical for enterprises.
Why it matters
RISC-V is an open instruction set, and its usefulness in servers depends less on the silicon than on whether mainstream Linux distributions, compilers and container tooling treat it as a first-class target. Canonical's numbers show the gap between packages existing and packages passing their tests, which is where enterprise readiness is actually decided. Fixing a baseline profile gives chip designers and software maintainers a shared target, the same step that preceded Arm's move into the data centre. The next two years of RVA23 hardware will show whether the software catches up in time.
Applications and packages
About 30,000 Universe packages and 3,000 Main packages; 95% available on riscv64, 55.1% passing tests on 26.10
Ubuntu kernels
A portfolio of kernels tuned for hyperscaler and silicon partners
RVA23 profile baseline
Standard 64-bit application profile requiring vector, hypervisor and bit-manipulation extensions; adopted in Ubuntu 25.10
RISC-V processors
Server-class RVA23 hardware expected from multiple vendors in 2026 and 2027, including SpacemiT and Alibaba platforms
What you can learn from this
An instruction set architecture is a contract between hardware and software. The ISA defines the instructions a processor understands, the registers it exposes and how memory is addressed. A compiler targets the ISA rather than a specific chip, which is what allows one binary to run on processors from different vendors. RISC-V publishes this contract openly, so anyone can implement it without a licence, but that also means implementations can differ in which optional extensions they include. Profiles exist to tame that variability.
Profiles such as RVA23 fix a common baseline. RISC-V is modular, with a small mandatory core and many optional extensions for vectors, cryptography, bit manipulation and virtualisation. A profile bundles a set of extensions that all compliant processors must support, so a distribution can compile once and assume those features are present. Moving Ubuntu's baseline to RVA23 means packages can use vector and hypervisor instructions without runtime checks, at the cost of not running on older RVA20 chips. The same trade-off is why x86 distributions define microarchitecture levels such as x86-64-v3.
Building and passing tests are different milestones. A package that compiles for a new architecture may still fail at runtime because of assumptions about word size, atomic operations, hand-written assembly or timing. Test suites catch these differences, which is why Canonical reports a pass rate separately from package availability. Closing the gap between 95 percent available and 55 percent passing involves fixing upstream projects one at a time. That work is slow and unglamorous, and it is the true measure of platform maturity.
Native build infrastructure speeds up porting. Cross-compiling on x86 machines works for producing binaries, but running test suites under emulation is slow and can hide hardware-specific bugs. Native runners on real RISC-V hardware let projects test on the actual target as part of continuous integration. The figures Canonical cited for runner jobs and minutes show how much of the porting effort now happens in automated pipelines rather than on developer desks. Access to hardware is therefore a bottleneck that cloud hosting can loosen.
Long-term support commitments are what enterprises buy. A distribution's promise to patch a package for many years matters more to a data centre operator than raw performance. Canonical's split between Main, with up to 15 years of support, and the community-maintained Universe tells buyers which parts of the system carry that guarantee. A new architecture only becomes a serious server option when the supported subset is complete enough to run real workloads. The Kubernetes and MicroCloud ports are steps toward that threshold.
We teach this
How to use this in practice
Boot a RISC-V Ubuntu image under emulation. Install QEMU, download the Ubuntu riscv64 server image from the Ubuntu website, and follow the published instructions to boot it with qemu-system-riscv64; expect the first boot to take several minutes under emulation. Log in and run
uname -mto confirm the architecture, then install any package with apt and note how long the installation takes compared with your host machine. Done looks like a shell prompt on a riscv64 guest with one package installed and a rough timing written down.Check which RISC-V extensions a system reports. Inside the emulated guest, run
cat /proc/cpuinfoand read the isa line, which lists the enabled extensions as a string beginning rv64 followed by letters and named extensions. Look up three of those letters or names and write down what each one adds, then check whether the guest reports the vector extension that RVA23 requires. Done looks like a short table mapping extension names to capabilities, with a yes or no beside the RVA23 requirement.Compare package availability for one tool you use. Pick a program you rely on, such as a database, a web server or a language runtime, and check whether it is packaged for riscv64 on the Ubuntu package search site, and whether its upstream project publishes RISC-V builds or lists RISC-V in its continuous-integration configuration. If the tool is packaged, try installing it inside your emulated guest and running its version command. Done looks like a one-paragraph note saying whether the tool would run on a RISC-V server today and what would block it.
Draw a layered diagram from silicon to application. Sketch five layers: processor implementation, ISA profile, kernel, distribution archives, and application. Annotate where the RVA23 baseline sits, where package tests run, and which layer carries the long-term support commitment. Done looks like a diagram that explains why a profile change in the distribution affects which chips are supported.
Sources
Our reporting is an original summary; full coverage is at the links above.
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