The Android Common Kernel is about to remove support for the RISC-V architecture.
Android Common Kernel is Google’s fork of the upstream Linux kernel, but with Android-specific additions.
RISC-V is an open-source architecture that is gaining increased popularity in the hardware space, and Google has been steadily working on implementing support for it in Android.
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Back in early 2023, Google announced that it was working on enabling support for the RISC-V architecture in Android. RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture that’s grown in popularity in recent years since hardware makers don’t need to pay a licensing fee to build RISC-V chips. Some Android devices already ship with chipsets based on RISC-V, though these chipsets typically run something other than Android and act as a co-processor to the device’s main, typically Arm-based processor.
Late last year, chip maker Qualcomm announced that it was designing a wearable chipset based on RISC-V and that this chipset would run on Google’s Android-based Wear OS platform. Once released, these Wear OS smartwatches would be the first commercial RISC-V hardware to run a Google-certified Android build. To make that happen, though, Google must devote a lot of engineering resources to making Android—aand its underlying Linux kernel fork—bboot on RISC-V hardware. Google has already done much of the work to enable RISC-V support in Android, though there’s quite a bit of work still ahead.
A Googler just uploaded a series of patches that remove the Android kernel’s support for the RISC-V architecture.