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.
X86 -> We have readily available hardware, a standardised bootloader (UEFI) and a standardised graphics output (VESA)
ARM -> We have readily available hardware but no standardised bootloader or graphics output
RISC-V -> We don’t have readily available hardware
The more open the ISA, the crappier the experience.
These are the limits of open-source when it comes to hardware. When it comes to chips that cannot be realistically burned on an FPGA, you need companies willing to invest in putting the hardware on a real chip (and if they can agree on a bootloader and graphics output standard, so much the better).
This ISA needs a “Kickstarter” to lift off.
If RISCV is “open” then by that reasoning Windows is also open, because there is MSDN and ReactOS. In current state RISCV is trash, however it’s slowly getting better (it will take years). Performance is subpar compared to ARM and generally available application processors are at Raspberry Pi 3 perfromance level (even RPi5 is not a speed daemon and far from being high performance, but it outperforms all of them). Not to mention they’re full of hardware bugs and substandard implementations (like certain opcodes are 2 times slower than the “unoptimized” stuff they’re trying to replace).
In addition to this, they copy stuff from ARM and don’t even hide it, starting from usage of AXI bus (xD), which makes them basically drop-in replacement of ARM cores. Chinese companies are even realeasing “1+1” chips, which contain ARM cores and RISCV cores on the same die, which are switchable. It’s like Linux kernel would implement loading of Windows DLLs for core subsystems.
RISC-V got seriously screwed when the Milk-V OASIS hit a snag. This should have been out six months ago:
https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-with-sg2380-a-revolutionary-risc-v-desktop-experience/780
The $120 Milk-V OASIS would have been faster than a Pi 5. It could handle up to 64GB of RAM:
https://milkv.io/chips/sg2380
The reasons the Milk-V OASIS was cancelled have nothing to do with technology. The SG2380 was going to be manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan but Sophgo got accused of trying to sneak chips made by TSMC to Huawei in violation of US sanctions. So TSMC refused to make the SG2380 and the Milk-V OASIS was cancelled.
“How Bizarre” – OMC (Organisation Mondiale du Commerce)
At least you can make “cheap” superclusters with RISC-V : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRfbQJ6FdF0
It seems like x86 will remain the most open and compatible system (for OS developers and users) for a long time to come.
Yeah, thank to quite reasonable implementations (AMD64 mostly) and a huge legacy software library out there.
Even the Snapdragon X Elite hasn’t made a dent in the x86 ecosystem.