Tech news in 3 minutes
QNAP QSW-M2130 2.5GbE and 10GbE Switches Shown
Canonical presented the evolution of enterprise open source RISC-V at Hot Chips 2026, detailing how Ubuntu is built and how ISA support is managed to make RISC-V enterprise-ready. Gordan Markuš, Canonical’s Director of Silicon Alliances, argued that an Ubuntu system should behave identically regardless of the processor, applying the same release and maintenance cycle to every architecture. Ubuntu’s Universe archive contains roughly 30,000 packages, while the smaller Main archive has about 3,000 packages with up to 15 years of support via Ubuntu Pro. For RISC-V, the riscv64 baseline moved from RVA20 to RVA23 with Ubuntu 25.10, requiring vector operations, hypervisor support, and bit manipulation for binary portability. Canonical also introduced architecture variants in Ubuntu 25.10, allowing packages built for different CPU features, a pattern planned for future RISC-V profiles. Package coverage on RISC-V has reached about 95% compared with amd64, but test pass rate stands at only 55.1% on an Ubuntu 26.10 snapshot, well below amd64’s 92%, partly due to emulated builds. Canonical is porting Kubernetes and MicroCloud for native RISC-V container orchestration and edge cloud. Open source collaboration through the RISE Project with RISC-V International targets commercial software readiness across mobile, datacenter, and automotive. Native RISC-V runners on Ubuntu 24.04 back a build farm hosted at Scaleway, reporting 24,000 jobs and 700,000 minutes across 116 organizations. With server-class RVA23 hardware expected from multiple vendors in 2026 and 2027, Canonical frames standardized profiles as the key to converging software targeting and achieving enterprise-grade multi-architecture maturity.