Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" Development Opens - Defaulting To -O3 Optimizations

Canonical has announced the formal state of the Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" development. Among other early changes are now defaulting to -O3 compiler optimizations rather than the default -O2 optimization level when building Debian packages.

Ubuntu 25.04 under the "Plucky Puffin" codename is now in development. Auto syncing from Debian has begun for a fresh flow of packages. Ubuntu 25.04 among its early changes is pulling in Perl 5.40 and Haskell / GHC 9.6.6. The dpkg-buildflags for the compiler flags for building Debian packages is now defaulting to "-O3" optimizations compared to the default "-O2" optimization level. For some packages this using -O3 optimizations by default may yield better performance.

Going back a few months Canonical had been evaluating -O3 optimization benefits for their Debian package builds. Glad to see this materializing for Ubuntu 25.04 and will be interesting to see what other performance improvements are made this cycle.

Plucky Puffin being open for development was announced today on the Ubuntu-devel list.

The Ubuntu 25.04 schedule has the feature freeze for 20 February, UI freeze for 13 March, the beta release on 27 March, and the Ubuntu 25.04 official release set for 17 April.

Stay tuned for more news/feature coverage of Ubuntu 25.04 as development gets underway and of course plenty of performance benchmarks for interesting changes.