RVA22 or RVA23? Discussing RVA ISA Baselines in Debian

[Yunseong Kim <ysk@kzalloc.com>]

Hello Debian RISC-V People,

I'm aware that the upcoming Ubuntu(>= 25.10) release will support only RVA23 or newer,
which effectively drops support for a large number of currently available
RISC-V boards.

This reminds me of the Debian transition to Power8 in the past, where some
systems couldn't boot due to ISA-level incompatibilities—especially when
optimized binaries required VSX instructions that older hardware didn't support.

In that context, I'm curious how Debian plans to approach baseline ISA support
for RISC-V.

Will Debian continue to target a broader baseline like RVA22 to retain
compatibility with older hardware, even at the cost of some performance
optimizations?

Or is there an ongoing discussion about moving toward RVA23 as well, to align
with upstream toolchains and OS ecosystems?

Link: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/07/08/ubuntu-25-10-release-to-mandate-rva23-profile-obsoleting-most-risc-v-hardware/

I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially considering how similar ISA
transitions have played out in other architectures like Power and ARM in the past.

I'd be interested in discussing how these kinds of baseline decisions are made
would it be okay to bring this up during the BoF?

Link: https://debconf25.debconf.org/talks/213-risc-v-bof/

Best regards,
Yunseong Kim