Mathieu Clemenceau, Director of Canonical, responsible for ubuntu foundations Team , published the state preparation state Ubuntu 25.04, the release of which is scheduled for 17 April. Among the changes:
- In addition to Initramfs-tools, it is planned to add optional support for Dracut for the formation of images of the initial RAM-disk (Initrd). In Ubuntu, the autumn issue of 25.10 Dracut tools intend to use the default. From the problems with Initramfs-Tools, which will be resolved after the transition to Dracut, it is mentioned: the inability to use Systemd in Initrd, the lack of support for NVMe Over Fabric (NVM-OF), the difficulty of maintaining due to separate work with Initrd and the Road FS, stagnation of Initramfs-tools development and abundance Shell code in Initrd.
- The transition to the supply of one common ISO-image Ubuntu Desktop for devices based on architecture ARM64, without the publication of individual assemblies specific to each device. The image can be used for installation on workstations with AmPere processors, laptops with Snapdragon chips, and even in virtual machines on the MAC systems of Apple Silicon.
- Improved tools for using devices based on ARM64 architecture as workstations with a graphic environment. Support for new devices, for example, based on Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite 13, added Ubuntu-X1e-Settings and Qcom-Firmware-Extract packages. For Raspberry Pi boards, a glass for working with the camera is provided.
- In the Autopkgtest automated testing infrastructure, RISC-V architecture is implemented.
- The developers intend to abandon the plan for using the Optimization mode “-O3” instead of “-O2” in the GCC “when assembling all packages. Testing on the entire package base showed that despite the increase in the performance of some types of load, the total system performance when switching to “-o3” has slightly decreased, and the total size of binary files increased.
- The main repository has been added to the instrumentation
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.