Google Removes RISC-V Support From Android Common Kernel, Denies Abandoning Its Efforts

Mishaal Rahman reports via Android Authority: Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android's Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that 'remove ACK's support for riscv64.' The description of these patches states that 'support for risc64 GKI kernels is discontinued.'

ACK stands for Android Common Kernel and refers to the downstream branches of the official kernel.org Linux kernels that Google maintains. The ACK is basically Linux plus some 'patches of interest to the Android community that haven't been merged into mainline or Long Term Supported (LTS) kernels.' There are multiple ACK branches, including android-mainline, which is the primary development branch that is forked into 'GKI' kernel branches that correspond to a particular combination of supported Linux kernel and Android OS version. GKI stands for Generic Kernel Image and refers to a kernel that's built from one of these branches. Every certified Android device ships with a kernel based on one of these GKI branches, as Google currently does not certify Android devices that ship with a mainline Linux kernel build.

Since these patches remove RISC-V kernel support, RISC-V kernel build support, and RISC-V emulator support, any companies looking to compile a RISC-V build of Android right now would need to create and maintain their own fork of Linux with the requisite ACK and RISC-V patches. Given that Google currently only certifies Android builds that ship with a GKI kernel built from an ACK branch, that means we likely won't see certified builds of Android on RISC-V hardware anytime soon. Our initial interpretation of these patches was that Google was preparing to kill off RISC-V support in Android since that was the most obvious conclusion. However, a spokesperson for Google told us this: '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).' Based on Google's statement, Rahman suggests that 'there's still a ton of work that needs to be done before Android is ready for RISC-V.'

'Even once it's ready, Google will need to redo the work to add RISC-V support in the kernel anyway. At the very least, Google's decision likely means that we might need to wait even longer than expected to see commercial Android devices running on a RISC-V chip.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.