Google gives Android support for RISC-V processors

Google is going to give its mobile operating system support for RISC-V processors. There has been code in Android for the isa since the end of September and several important elements will be added in the coming months.

Google wants RISC-V to become a ‘tier 1 platform’ within Android, is evident from the keynote of the company at the RISC-V summit last month. Patches have been made within the kernel since the end of September. It only concerns 64-bit builds, because various functions within Android require 64-bit and because devices nowadays last longer.

Support for RISC-V within the Android runtime is coming before the end of March, which means all Java apps will be able to run on RISC-V hardware. An emulator will also be available soon. Then there are still optimizations to make Android run properly on the instruction set architecture, isa.

Android now mainly runs on Arm processors, although there is also support for X86. That support is not complete. RISC-V is an alternative open source ISA. The RISC-V summit was in mid-December, but the keynotes were only recently posted online. Google is presumably eager to support the processor architecture, as Arm has not been a stable partner in recent years, says Ars Technica. For example, Softbank wanted to sell Arm to Nvidia, but that fell through. Now the company has to go public, but that has not happened yet.