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ARM already did the hard work. Once you've ported your app to ARM, you've no doubt made sure all the ISA-specific bits are isolated while the rest is generic an
by hajile 2y ago
ARM already did the hard work. Once you've ported your app to ARM, you've no doubt made sure all the ISA-specific bits are isolated while the rest is generic and portable. This means you already know where to go and what to change and hopefully already have testing in place to make sure your changes work correctly.
Aside from the philosophy, lots of practical work has been done and is ongoing. On the systems level, there has already been massive ongoing work. Alibaba for example ported the entirety of Android to RISC-V then handed it off to Google. Lots of other big companies have tons of coders working on porting all kinds of libraries to RISC-V and progress has been quite rapid.
And of course, it is worth pointing out that an overwhelming majority of day-to-day software is written in managed languages on runtimes that have already been ported to RISC-V.
- NavinF 2y agoInteresting, does anyone know what percentage of top Android apps run on RISC-V? I'd expect a lot of apps like games to only have binaries for ARM
- Pet_Ant 2y agoAren’t Android binaries in Dalvik so you only need to port that to get it to run on RISC-V?
- NavinF 2y agohttps://developer.android.com/ndk https://developer.android.com/ndk
- snvzz 2y agoAren't most applications NOT using the ndk?
- monocasa 2y agoNDK usage is pretty high among applications that actually matter.
- saagarjha 2y agoMost major apps use the NDK.
- pjmlp 2y agoEveryone that doesn't want to write Java/Kotlin is using the NDK. Although from Google's point of view the NDK only purpose is for enabling writing native methods, reuse of C and C++ libraries, games and real time audio, from point of view of others, it is how they sneak Cordova, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin,.... into Android.
- canucker2016 2y agoMany games, multimedia apps (native FFMPEG libs), and other apps that require native C/C++ libs would require a recompile/translation for RISC-V.
- shash 2y agoFFMPEG has a RISC-V port. We're yet to try it, but I did successfully compile it to target RISC-V vector extensions.
- ThatPlayer 2y agoNot Android, but Box86 already works on RISC-V, even already running games on top of Wine and DXVK: https://youtu.be/qHLKB39xVkw https://youtu.be/qHLKB39xVkw It redirects calls to x86 libraries to native RISC-V versions of the library.
- anthk 2y agoMost FLOSS libraries are already ported over thanks to GNU/Linux.
- KRAKRISMOTT 2y agoThe thing about RISC-V is that they indirectly have the R&D coffers of the Chinese government backing them for strategic reasons. They are the hardware equivalent of Uber's scale-first-make-money later strategy. This is not a competition that ARM can win purely relying on their existing market dominance.