Google will release Android RISC-V emulators to test apps in 2024

Earlier this month, Qualcomm announced it was working with Google on a RISC-V Wear OS chip. The Android team today provided an update on RISC-V adoption, including an initial timeline and emulator support. 

RISC-V is a free and open instruction set architecture (ISA), bringing the same spirit of industry-wide collaboration and innovation that we see in software around open source to the hardware ecosystem. Invented 10 years ago at the University of California, Berkeley, RISC-V has seen rapid adoption in embedded and microcontroller spaces, and in recent years has expanded into accelerators, servers, and mobile computing.

Google

Google says it has “begun to mature support for RISC-V in Android” with a particular focus on ensuring that “any CPU running RISC-V will have all of the features we expect to achieve high performance.”

At the moment, developers can “build, test, and run the Android support for RISC-V on your own machine” using Cuttlefish Virtual Device support. You can specifically build and run a basic Android Open Source Project (AOSP) experience that is “not yet fully optimized” but at a stage that Google believes is “ready to allow experimentation and collaboration.”

For example, work on a fully optimized backend for the Android Runtime (ART) is still a work in progress. Additionally, AOSP, our external projects, and compilers haven’t generated fully optimized, reduced code that also takes advantage of the latest ratified extensions, such as the one for vectors.

In terms of ensuring app compatibility, Google plans to “have the NDK ABI finalized and canary builds available on Android’s public CI soon and RISC-V on x86-64 & ARM64 available for easier testing” later this year.

The bigger Android milestone is publicly available RISC-V emulators in 2024 “with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors.” Google reiterates that wearables are expected to be the first form factor available. 

Make sure to stay tuned as we look into ways to make it as easy for Android developers writing native to target new platforms as it is for our Java and Kotlin developers!

In terms of contributing, Google points to the following resources:

• “https://github.com/google/android-riscv64 for detailed information on how to build and test the RISC-V support in Android, list of known issues and opportunities to contribute to AOSP at source.android.com and toolchain projects and support libraries.”
• “Subscribe to RISC-V Android SIG mailing list or join directly, if your organization is a member of RISC-V International to stay tuned in to progress and offer your suggestions and feedback.”