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Reads like a typical "will be released when it's ready, but it's not ready". Or providing a (single) generic kernel for RISC-V is impractical, so support for t
by RetroTechie 2y ago
Reads like a typical "will be released when it's ready, but it's not ready".
Or providing a (single) generic kernel for RISC-V is impractical, so support for that is removed until another approach is figured out? Just speculating here.
But Android-on-RISC-V is pretty much unavoidable at this point. Google-blessed or otherwise. If Google won't do it (article does not suggest that?), the open source community will. Or the Chinese. Or some other deep-pocketed corp interested in pushing this ahead.
- whimsicalism 2y agoDoes it? They say the risc-v support “is discontinued”, which seems to imply something much stronger than what you say.
- camel-cdr 2y agoThe article says: > Android will continue to support RISC-V. Due to the rapid rate of iteration, we are not ready to provide a single supported image for all vendors. This particular series of patches removes RISC-V support from the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI). There is some more context in the android SIG: https://lists.riscv.org/g/sig-android/topic/105816077#msg389 https://lists.riscv.org/g/sig-android/topic/105816077#msg389
- andrekandre 2y agothat link makes it much more clear > they are removing older code for Qualcomm specific use case that is no longer supported (Wear OS IIRC was discontinued). That pre-dates all the current work, so I expect this was removed because the platform was deprecated and > since maintenance of an officially _labelled_ GKI kernel is more expensive, we're removing the sticker for now. so... basically a nothingburger?
- tadfisher 2y agoThe question is, which RISC-V? You're providing a single kernel for phone-like things, so probably RV64I as a base. MAFD is pretty much required for running a Java VM. Q, no. C, are you shipping for Si-Five or Qualcomm? J/T/P/V would be useful, but does the kernel need it? H is needed for Android phones these days but not watches. S, no idea. The explanation makes sense to me; let the dust settle and have real hardware shipping before defining the base feature set in a generic kernel image.
- MaxBarraclough 2y agoWhat's MAFD? (I don't know the instruction-set well and Google didn't turn up anything informative.)
- snvzz 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#ISA_base_and_extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#ISA_base_and_extensions
- MaxBarraclough 2y agoThat doesn't directly answer the question. The answer seems to be that MAFD refers to the union of the M, A, F, and D extensions to the baseline ISA, adding integer multiplication and division instructions (M), atomic instructions (A), single-precision floating point instructions (F), and double-precision floating point instructions (D).
- mperham 2y agoThe sheer number of RISC-V extensions and the resulting fragmentation is blowing my mind. No wonder they can't provide a single generic kernel.
- tadfisher 2y agoThere are baseline profiles, like RV23A, that standardize a set of extensions for a class of hardware. Problem right now is that Qualcomm and Si-Five disagree on what extensions should be supported, and there is hardware shipping or in development with two different definitions.
- panick21_ 2y agoLiterally everybody agrees except Qualcomm who want to basically no participate, come in on the side and make it quasi propitiatory.
- h0l0cube 2y ago> But Android-on-RISC-V is pretty much unavoidable at this point. I’m curious to know what happens to the significant portion of apps that rely on the NDK? Might there be some possible emulation layer like Rosetta 2 like with Apple Silicon?
- mrpippy 2y agoIf Google cares enough, then yeah probably. They have an emulator (libhoudini) to run ARM apps on x86 (Chrome OS being the main use case)