Drush dl not working with PHP 7 and ubuntu 16.04 When i try to do:

drush dl drupal-8


i get the following error:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function Drush\UpdateService\simplexml_load_file() in /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/lib/Drush/UpdateService/Project.php:74
Stack trace:
#0 /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/lib/Drush/UpdateService/ReleaseInfo.php(64): Drush\UpdateService\Project::getInstance(Array, 86400)
#1 /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/lib/Drush/UpdateService/ReleaseInfo.php(122): Drush\UpdateService\ReleaseInfo-&gt;get(Array)
#2 /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/commands/pm/download.pm.inc(111): Drush\UpdateService\ReleaseInfo-&gt;selectReleaseBasedOnStrategy(Array, '', 'auto', false, NULL)
#3 /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/includes/command.inc(366): drush_pm_download()
#4 /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/includes/command.inc(217): _drush_invoke_hooks(Array, Array)
#5 /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/includes/command.inc(185): drush_command()
#6 /home/alexander/.config/compos in /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/lib/Drush/UpdateService/Project.php on line 74
Drush command terminated abnormally due to an unrecoverable error.


Other commands does work: drush cc, drush status.

Here's output of drush status:

 PHP executable         :  /usr/bin/php
 PHP configuration      :  /etc/php/7.0/cli/php.ini
 PHP OS                 :  Linux
 Drush script           :  /home/alexander/.config/composer/vendor/drush/drush/drush.php
 Drush version          :  8.1.2
 Drush temp directory   :  /tmp
 Drush configuration    :
 Drush alias files      :
Sounds like you managed to install/configure PHP without the simplexml extension.

Install the php7.0-xml package with apt-get as follows. 

sudo apt-get install php-xml


Also check the UI installer, if you're missing this, then you're likely also missing a bunch of other extensions link mbstring, gd and so on to install/use Drupal.