Hello friends. Following up on my Raspberry Pi summer update from last year, I wanted to write about everything that has happened for Ubuntu on ARM over the past twelve months.
But first, some history. Ubuntu’s involvement with ARM goes back to November 2012, when companies including AMD, Canonical, Facebook, HP, Marvell, Red Hat, and a few others came together within Linaro to form the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG). The goal was to accelerate Linux development for ARM servers. At the time, ARM servers had little software ecosystem. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS had just become the only commercially supported OS to deploy on ARM v7 server hardware, and Canonical committed to delivering ARM v8 support during 2013.
Over the following decade, ARM evolved from an emerging server architecture into one that now powers everything from cloud infrastructure and developer workstations to edge devices and single-board computers. As the ecosystem has matured, our focus has shifted from simply supporting ARM to ensuring Ubuntu on arm64 delivers the same quality, performance, and developer experience as every other primary architecture.
That brings us to today. Over the past 6-12 months, we’ve been working across the Ubuntu stack to make arm64 truly a first-class architecture.
arm64 packages moved from ports to the main archive
Starting with Ubuntu 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon), arm64 packages have moved from ports.ubuntu.com to the official archive.ubuntu.com. The ports archive has historically been the home for non-amd64 architectures (arm64, armhf, ppc64el, s390x, and more recently riscv64). Moving arm64 into the main archive means packages are now automatically distributed across Ubuntu’s mirrors, improving download speeds, reliability, and availability.
In practical terms, arm64 is no longer treated as a ports architecture. It is now served from the same archive infrastructure as amd64.
This wasn’t a simple archive configuration change. The migration required coordinated updates across cloud-init, live-build, livecd-rootfs, and ubuntu-release-upgrader, all tracked in LP #2147101. The migration is now complete for Ubuntu 26.04, with the work being backported to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Many thanks to the Ubuntu Release and Infrastructure teams for making it happen.
Livepatch for arm64
On June 23, 2026, Canonical announced live kernel patching for arm64. Ubuntu systems running on arm64 can now receive critical kernel security fixes without requiring a reboot, bringing the architecture to feature parity with the long-standing amd64 Livepatch service. A list of supported kernels is available in the Livepatch documentation.
Getting here required upstream kernel and toolchain work that didn’t exist a couple of years ago, dedicated arm64 build-farm instances for native compilation, and new architecture-specific regression test suites. Livepatch for arm64 is available with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
Steam on arm64
In January 2026, @mitchellaugustin put out a call for testing for an arm64 build of the Steam snap. Since the Steam client for Linux is x86-only, the snap bundles it with FEX, a userspace emulator, to run amd64 games on ARM hardware. The snap was promoted to stable on June 2, 2026, with support extended to Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops and the Radxa Orion O6.
This is not a Valve-supported project, it’s a Canonical enablement effort built on top of Valve’s and the FEX team’s work. For details on supported platforms, games, and FEX configuration options, check the call for testing and stable announcement. posts.
Snapdragon X Elite laptops and Secure Boot
Ubuntu 25.04 introduced support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops using the generic arm64 desktop ISO. Alongside the release, @tobhe has maintained a comprehensive Ubuntu Discourse FAQ covering installation, firmware, and known issues. It has since grown into a valuable community resource with nearly 300 posts.
One of the biggest remaining challenges was Secure Boot. Unlike most PCs, Snapdragon laptops require device trees that their firmware does not provide to Linux. Until recently, there was no Secure Boot-compatible mechanism for supplying those device trees at boot. The solution is stubble, a new EFI stub that embeds the required device trees directly into the signed kernel image. Because the resulting binary flows through Ubuntu’s existing Launchpad signing pipeline, Secure Boot works without introducing a separate trust chain.
Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, Snapdragon X Elite laptops can boot Ubuntu with Secure Boot enabled, and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is the first LTS release to include this capability.
We’re also working on enablement for the next generation of Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops, building on the same generic arm64 ISO foundation.
CIX P1
The arm64 laptop ecosystem is no longer just about Qualcomm. In May 2026, we released an Ubuntu Concept image for the CIX Technology P1, our first public enablement for a laptop based on a completely different ARM SoC vendor. The image is built on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with a Linux 7.0 kernel derived from CIX’s open-source release.
One interesting difference is the platform firmware. Unlike Snapdragon laptops, which currently rely on device trees, the CIX P1 uses a conventional ACPI-based boot flow. As a result, it doesn’t require the stubble EFI work described above and boots much like a traditional PC.
The image is still aimed at developers and early adopters, but it demonstrates that Ubuntu’s arm64 desktop work is expanding beyond a single silicon vendor.
Chrome and Widevine on arm64
This isn’t Ubuntu work directly, but it’s an important milestone for the Linux on arm64 ecosystem.
One of the biggest gaps for arm64 desktop users has been browser-based DRM support. Many streaming services, including Netflix, Spotify, and Disney+, rely on Widevine to play protected content. Chromium does not include Widevine, but Google Chrome does. Chrome has not been available for Linux on arm64, leaving users to rely on community-maintained workarounds, many of them originating from the Asahi Linux project.
That changed in March 2026, when Google announced that Chrome for Linux on arm64 will launch in 2026. It will bring built-in Widevine support to Ubuntu on arm64, eliminating the need for third-party installers or patches for browser-based DRM playback. The availability of Widevine on arm64 also enables native support in other snaps. The Firefox and Spotify snaps will integrate Widevine on arm64, bringing the same out-of-the-box DRM experience that amd64 users already have. Google is also partnering with NVIDIA to make Chrome easy to install on the DGX Spark OS.
The snap ecosystem
It’s not just Steam and Chrome. The broader snap ecosystem has continued to expand its arm64 support over the past year. Popular snaps such as OnlyOffice, FreeCAD, and Teams for Linux now publish arm64 builds, making more productivity software available natively on Ubuntu.
While there is still work to do, the gap between the software available on amd64 and arm64 Ubuntu continues to shrink, reducing the need for emulation or workarounds.
Wrapping up
A year ago, arm64 on Ubuntu still had several rough edges, a separate package archive, no live kernel patching, limited gaming support, and Snapdragon laptops that required special images and could not use Secure Boot. Over the past twelve months, many of those gaps have been closed.
This progress comes from sustained upstream kernel work, toolchain and infrastructure improvements, and extensive testing across an expanding range of ARM hardware.
A special thanks goes to the people who made much of this work possible: Mitchell Augustin @mitchellaugustin (Steam snap), Tobias Heider @tobhe (Snapdragon and CIX enablement), the Ubuntu community for extensive testing, feedback, and documentation, and the wider Foundations, Desktop, Kernel, Release, and Infrastructure teams.