If you run Ubuntu 26.04 development builds as your main and noticed an above-average number of updates in recent days, don’t be excited: there aren’t stacks of new features landing – at least, not ones you can see.

Rather, Ubuntu engineers are doing a “mass rebuild of all source packages”, re-compiling them from scratch to ensure the right hardware compatibility features are enabled.

This ensures apps, libraries and tools spanning the entire resolute archive are using the distro’s preferred baselines where able – yup, even those dusty libraries that rarely see any major update, ever.

As the ‘Resolute Raccoon’ is a long-term support (LTS) release, laborious housekeeping efforts such as this are both expected and, ultimately, beneficial to users of Ubuntu and those who make it for many years to come.

Among ‘features’ this mass rebuild covers:

  • Frame pointers
  • ELF package metadata
  • amd64-v3 architecture variant
  • RVA23 baseline for riscv64
  • IEEE long double for ppc64el
  • Z15 baseline for s390x

Right now, some of those are hit-or-miss as to whether they’re enabled.

Not all packages are being rebuilt with all changes (so don’t expect every package to suddenly adopt every new baseline or architecture variant – it’s a mass rebuild, but you can’t teach an old library new tricks).

Yet, where applicable, these bumps have their pluses.

Frame pointers are used in performance profiling, letting developers pinpoint bottlenecks and resource leaks. ELF package metadata embeds package information directly in binaries, making it easier to identify which package a file belongs to.

Ubuntu expanding the number of amd64-v3 architecture variant packages it offers will please those of you who chose to enable amd64v3 packages in Ubuntu 25.10 to take full advantage of modern CPU features.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is not defaulting to amd64-v3 here, only recompiling more packages in the archive in this variant to make them available.

On a similar tack, since Ubuntu’s RISC-V baseline profile was raised to RVA23 it makes sense to ensure packages are properly in step (especially since newer versions of Ubuntu can’t run on the older RISC-V profile at all).

RISC-V is niche in the consumer tech space but is increasingly important in edge, IoT and industrial computing – areas where Ubuntu is the go-to OS.

Other platforms targeted include ppc4el (PowerPC) with IEEE long double support (for greater mathematical precision) and Z15 baseline for s390x (IBM Z), so mainframe customers benefit from the hardware features they pay for.

This rebuild is still in motion, so if you ride the bleeding edge you should expect to more items filtering through during your daily apt update.