Ubuntu emphasizes Arm64 support – and gets Rustier

os platforms

Even so, it has some issues with the Rust coreutils

Some of Canonical’s ambitions for the future directions of Ubuntu are becoming apparent – despite some bumps in the road.

Canonical engineering manager Ravi Kant Sharma posted an Ubuntu on Arm summer ’26 update on the Ubuntu Discourse. The company is boosting its efforts to make running Ubuntu on Arm64 a first-class experience. Some of the changes are behind the scenes, and others will be more immediately visible.

Last month, Canonical announced that Ubuntu’s support for patching the live, running kernel now included Arm64 systems, on both mainstream Ubuntu 26.04 and the IoT-focused immutable Ubuntu Core 26. This indicates one of Canonical’s focuses: kernel live-patching is a server feature. For desktop or laptop machines, there’s no compelling need for something as tricky as this: you can just save your work and reboot.

As The Register recently reported, Arm server sales are now nearly half the market – and server support is where Canonical makes most of its money.

At least some of it is about end-user systems, though: earlier in June, Canonical announced a native Arm64 snap package of Valve’s Steam client. This includes x86-32 and x86-64 binaries, using the FEX emulation layer. This is the Linux world’s equivalent of Apple’s Rosetta 2 layer in macOS. Development of FEX has been funded by Valve for years, as it will be an important element of the forthcoming Steam Frame VR headset that the company announced last year.

Ubuntu’s support for Arm laptops is extending beyond Qualcomm SOCs: there’s a Resolute Raccoon “concept image” for CIX P1-based hardware, meaning devices built around the new CIX Technologies P1, which got Linux kernel support a year ago. This is used in some Radxa and Orange Pi SBCs, and there’s even a Framework laptop motherboard using it.

As The Reg reported in March, official Google Chrome for Arm64 Linux is coming, and that also means support for Widevine DRM. Other apps can use the Chrome libraries, so this will improve support for DRM-protected streaming media in Firefox and Spotify, for instance. These days more snap packages support Arm64, as well.

It’s now some three years since the Reg FOSS desk looked at an Arm-based laptop, the Lenovo Thinkpad X13s Gen1. Even in 2023, Ubuntu was siginficantly ahead of any other Linux distro in how well it supported the hardware, but things continue to get better.

Arm64 packages are being moved to the main Ubuntu download servers on archive.ubuntu.com. Until now, they were hosted on the specialist ports.ubuntu.com servers, along with other non-x86 versions such as PowerPC, RISC-V, and IBM mainframes. This means that the Arm64 packages will be automatically carried by Ubuntu’s mirror servers around the world.

This is not a trivial change: it required changes to the scripts and build pipeline that put together Ubuntu installation images. This exposed some bugs, for instance this one in cloudinit.

Back in April when the company released the current Ubuntu LTS version, we reported that Jon Seager, VP of Engineering, promised to “make interim releases crazy again,” and that one of the plans was to adopt the new Rust Network Time Protocol daemon. The company is putting its money where its mouth is: at the end of last month, it stepped up to become a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation.

Trifecta Tech is the non-profit organization developing ntpd-rs, as well as the new sudo-rs tool, a bug which last year caused a security issue in Ubuntu 25.10. It’s based at the same address as Netherlands Rust consultancy Tweede Golf. (Its name, which we will not attempt to render phonetically in English, means “second wave” in Dutch, and we were slightly disappointed to learn that it’s nothing to do with either the fabric tweed or the game of golf.)

(While clearing up potential misunderstandings, as Trifecta Tech developed both sudo-rs and ntpd-rs, it did not create the new Rust coreutils used in recent versions of Ubuntu. The new NTP daemon is also independent from the NTPsec Project, which describes itself as “a secure, hardened, and improved implementation of Network Time Protocol derived from NTP Classic, Dave Mills’s original.” As he blogged a decade ago, the main contributor to the NTPSec effort is controversial open source celebrity Eric Raymond.)

It is interesting to note that Canonical is pressing ahead with moving more core components to Rust even as it encounters issues with its current adoption of the Rust coreutils. A new bug describes an issue with the Rust version of the cp command: a problem with how it interprets the -L switch. According to the manual page for cp, this means:

    -L, --dereference

    always follow symbolic links in SOURCE

For now, the team has reverted to using the classic C-based GNU `cp` command, but the bug shows how subtle behavior of the new replacements for these core Unix commands is risky. ®