I presume the motivation is performance optimization? It would be more compelling to include some of the benefits in the announcement?

They do mention it in the linked announcement, although not really highlighted, just as a quick mention:

> As a result, we’re very excited to share that in Ubuntu 25.10, some packages are available, on an opt-in basis, in their optimized form for the more modern x86-64-v3 architecture level

> Previous benchmarks we have run (where we rebuilt the entire archive for x86-64-v3 57) show that most packages show a slight (around 1%) performance improvement and some packages, mostly those that are somewhat numerical in nature, improve more than that.

ARM/RISC-V extensions may be another reason. If a wide-spread variant configuration exists, why not build for it? See: - RISC-V's official extensions[1] - ARM's JS-specific float-to-fixed[2]

1. https://riscv.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/HOME/pages/16154732/... 2. https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0801/h/A64-Floati...