I can kind of understand this, since RISC-V hasn't really made much in the way of inroads into the phone and tablet market, working to keep those patches up to date and testing them is probably a not insignificant amount of work. They can always add it back later if there's a need for it.
Google pulls RISC-V support from generic Android kernel
Support for RISC-V was dropped from Android's Generic Kernel Image (GKI) thanks to a patch successfully merged today. The patch, filed under the topic "ack_riscv64_turndown" on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) tracker, removes files from the Android Generic Kernel (GKI) that existed to implement support for RISC-V, an …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 1st May 2024 19:15 GMT doublelayer
Given how many Chinese companies design chips around ARM cores, then manufacture them, then write the software that runs on them, I don't think that's the reasoning. China can, whenever it wants, stop paying ARM for licenses and still crank out as many ARM chips as they want. I'm sure American politicians will figure this out in time and make statements about how they'll prevent them from doing so which will have about as much success as their desires to prevent them from using RISC-V, which is about as much if they announced that they will be banning them from using iron.
Meanwhile, to keep the code in the project means plenty of developer time spent testing and fixing these things, all for hardware that doesn't exist. It's not surprising that Google wants to wait until their work is achieving something before they take on the effort of maintaining it. Almost certainly, if Qualcomm starts to make RISC-V phone chips and gets someone to build a device around them, they will merge plenty of changes to account for how their version differs from the theoretical version. When they're done with that, Google can merge the important ones back into their project rather than trying to do that continuously. The effect of the delay to end users will be unnoticeable.
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Wednesday 1st May 2024 22:06 GMT Jason Bloomberg
It does look to me like a 'come back when you've got something which isn't shifting sand' scenario. If RISC-V support was to be dropped entirely I would have expected them to have done more than they have.
It has always intrigued me as to why Android has so much architecture specific code. Chip or product specific code for memory, display, IO, and initialisation I can understand, but the rest should merely be a compiler option.
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Thursday 2nd May 2024 07:30 GMT StrangerHereMyself
I'm worried that the U.S. politicians are starting to see open-source more and more as a liability. They believe that sharing information on AI and processor designs will aid our adversaries and help them to keep up technologically and thwart sanctions.
Congress is already moving to discourage the sharing of AI models under the guise of fighting "misinformation" and "responsible security." The same is happening with RISC-V and I fear that they'll move towards software in general like cryptographic ciphers or encrypted communications apps next. Eventually all open-source software which can broadly be interpreted as "aiding our enemies" could become suspect. And yes, that includes Linux, but also CAD programs (KiCad, FreeCAD), FEM software, 3D printing software and embedded operating systems.
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Saturday 4th May 2024 10:19 GMT K
They tried this back in the late 90's with PGP, it didn't get very far... hell they even tried forcing all PCs to have a backdoor.
Besides, America doesn't do this alone.. Nvidia, Intel, AMD etc rely upon global sales to cover the cost of R&D... take that away, and some-one else will step into the spot, yes probably ARM or a Chinese company.. the only bug loser is the US economy and they'll no longer dominate the Tech game.
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Thursday 2nd May 2024 20:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Google Still Supporting 64-bit RISC-V
This is being reported incorrectly by many outlets.
Google clarifies:
https://lists.riscv.org/g/sig-android/message/389
Nothing has changed for android RISC-V RV64 support for AOSP.
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Wednesday 1st May 2024 18:50 GMT 3arn0wl
This seems like really odd timing.
As the piece says, there's a Qualcomm-Google collaboration for RISC-V smartwatches, but also, there's a couple of more-capable RISC-V processors on the near horizon :
- the SpacemiT K1 and the
- the sophgo SG2380
both of which are capable of running Linux or Android smoothly.
RISC-V is going to be a thing, with or without Android : other OSs are available.
I can only think this is political.
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Wednesday 1st May 2024 21:02 GMT HuBo
Re: This seems like really odd timing.
... or maybe it is technical. Android needs Java (or Kotlin), and if I read the related benchmarks correctly, the RISC-V SiFive HiFive Unmatched gets a Java JMH throughput of 6.8 Million ops/s, while a run of the mill (for smartphones) Rockchip 3588 ARM Cortex-A76 gets 6.7 Billion ops/s (similar to Intel Core i3-4130).
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Thursday 2nd May 2024 19:07 GMT aerogems
Re: This seems like really odd timing.
And... if any of those products do well in the market, they may reverse the decision. Still, even if one or two products become smash successes, that's not even a drop in the ocean of all the other Android on ARM devices out there. You start getting at least mid-double digits and they may consider it worth the resources needed to have these patches as part of the main tree.
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Wednesday 1st May 2024 18:57 GMT abend0c4
A future RV smartphone
In view of recent developments, my initial thought that this was to be Tesla's next vehicle.