AOSP begins with the works of the initial support for RISC-V in Android 

android RISC-V

RISC-V support in Android opens up a new panorama of possibilities

Recently, via a blog post RISC-V announced that in the repository AOSP (Android Open Source Project) that develops the source code of the Android platform, has started to include changes to support devices with processors based on the RISC-V architecture.

The patch set RISC-V support was prepared by Alibaba Cloud and includes 76 patches covering various subsystems.

Among the works carried out graphics stack, sound system, the video playback components, the bionic library, the dalvik virtual machine, the frameworks, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth stacks, the developer tools, and various third-party modules, including models for TensorFlow Lite and machine learning modules for text recognition, sound and image classification.

Of the total set of patches, 30 patches related to system environment and libraries have already been integrated into AOSP. Over the next several months, Alibaba Cloud intends to release additional patches for AOSP to enable RISC-V support in the kernel, Android Runtime (ART), and emulator.

“We are pleased to see more support from Google to create AOSPs targeting RISC-V! Alibaba Cloud is committed to supporting the RISC-V community through a number of innovations, such as advancing the migration of core Android features to RISC-V, demonstrating the feasibility of using RISC-based devices. -V in scenarios ranging from multimedia to signal processing, device interconnection and artificial intelligence. We look forward to collaborating with the Android team to contribute to the thriving RISC-V community in the future,” said Dr. David Chen, Director of Ecosystem at Alibaba Cloud and Vice President of RISC-V International Applications and Tools Horizontal Committee. .

"RISC-V has grown in popularity through the high demand for flexibility and choice across the spectrum of computing, from the smallest embedded appliances to the largest scale-out cloud deployments," said Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V. RISC-V International. "This demand has made RISC-V inevitable as the most prolific open ISA standard of our time, accelerating innovation and adoption with the strongest ecosystem of global stakeholders."

To support RISC-V support on Android, RISC-V International has created a dedicated Android SIG which can be joined by other companies interested in running the Android software stack on RISC-V processors. The move of RISC-V support to mainstream Android is being done in collaboration with Google and the community.

Proposed Changes for Android are part of an initiative to expand the reach of mobile devices based on architecture RISC-V.

In 2020, engineers and software developers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences PLCT lab began porting Android 10 to the RISC-V architecture in an effort to open up this important ecosystem to the RISC-V community. Since the early days of the effort, the Alibaba Cloud division has been a close contributor and leader in this pioneering work and has kept development up-to-date with newer versions of Android.

Last year, Alibaba opened the developments related to XuanTie RISC-V processors and began actively promoting RISC-V not only for IoT devices and server systems, but also for consumer devices and various specialized chips, covering various applications from multimedia systems to signal processing and accelerators for machine learning.

For those unaware of RISC-V, you should know that this provides an open and flexible system of instructions of machine that allows you to create microprocessors for arbitrary applications, without requiring royalties and without imposing conditions of use. RISC-V allows the creation of completely open SoCs and processors.

For those interested, you should know that currently, based on the RISC-V specification, various companies and communities under various free licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0) are developing several dozen variants of microprocessor cores, around a hundred SoC and chips already manufactured. RISC-V support has been around since the releases of Glibc 2.27, binutils 2.30, gcc 7, and Linux kernel 4.15.

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.


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