Android is an open source operating system that is freely available to port to many devices and architectures. As such it supports many different device types and CPU architectures. We’re excited to be adding a new one to that list – RISC-V.
RISC-V is a free and open instruction set architecture (ISA), bringing the same spirit of industry-wide collaboration and innovation that we see in software around open source to the hardware ecosystem. Invented 10 years ago at the University of California, Berkeley, RISC-V has seen rapid adoption in embedded and microcontroller spaces, and in recent years has expanded into accelerators, servers, and mobile computing.
In November of 2022, we announced at the RISC-V Summit that we were accepting patches for RISC-V:
The latest update that we have is that now not only are we accepting patches, but we have begun to mature support for RISC-V in Android. RISC-V is a modular ISA, meaning that there are a large number of optional extensions. We have also determined an initial set that we feel is critical to ensure that any CPU running RISC-V will have all of the features we expect to achieve high performance. This set includes the rva22 profile as well as the vector and vector crypto extensions. This update was provided at the RISC-V summit in Europe:
You can build, test, and run the Android support for RISC-V on your own machine as well now! Just like other platform targets in AOSP, you can use the Cuttlefish Virtual Device support:
$ lunch aosp_cf_riscv64_phone-userdebug |
Then, you can use vncviewer to connect to the running device and interact.
At this time, these patches will support building and running a basic Android Open Source Project experience, but are not yet fully optimized. For example, work on a fully optimized backend for the Android Runtime (ART) is still a work in progress. Additionally, AOSP, our external projects, and compilers haven’t generated fully optimized, reduced code that also takes advantage of the latest ratified extensions, such as the one for vectors. However, we believe that it is ready to allow experimentation and c
