Android for RISC-V is ready: Alibaba T-Head releases its latest demo and source code

Wei Wu (吴伟)

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Jan 21, 2021, 6:49:26 AM1/21/21

to RISC-V SW Dev

Hi all,

I am very happy to share the info with you:

The Android (AOSP) is now running on RISC-V with graphic support! Alibaba T-Head has released a short video[1], demoing Android on the XuanTie C910 dev board. The source code has been put on github[2], with a quickstart guide (in English)[3].

[1] https://occ.t-head.cn/development/series/Index?id=3872715572777455616&type=kind&softPlatformType=8

[2] https://github.com/T-head-Semi/aosp-riscv

[3] https://github.com/T-head-Semi/aosp-riscv/blob/main/QUICKSTART.md

There is another ongoing porting work [4] which is led by the PLCT Lab. We are just starting to port ART, and have no graphics support yet. Since T-Head has open sourced, the PLCT Lab has started to collaborate with the T-Head, and contribute to T-Head's repos. The two independent projects would be merged into one.

[4] https://github.com/aosp-riscv

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Best wishes,
Wei Wu, PLCT Lab.

Wei Wu (吴伟)

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Jan 21, 2021, 6:56:38 AM1/21/21

to RISC-V SW Dev

Oh, Sorry for the duplicate news. I just found out that the leader from Alibaba has just posted the news 40 minutes ago[1].

Again, Congratulations!

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/g/sw-dev/c/4eIHN2kB-Ak

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Best wishes,
Wei Wu (吴伟)

Karim Yaghmour

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Jan 21, 2021, 10:49:52 AM1/21/21

to Wei Wu (吴伟), RISC-V SW Dev

Hi Wei,

This is awesome work. Have you looked at submitting this for inclusion
in the AOSP?
https://android-review.googlesource.com/

Cheers,

--
Karim Yaghmour
CEO - Opersys inc. / www.opersys.com
http://twitter.com/karimyaghmour

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Wei Wu (吴伟)

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Jan 21, 2021, 8:41:44 PM1/21/21

to Karim Yaghmour, RISC-V SW Dev

Hi Karim,

I've talked to the tech leaders of this AOSP project from Alibaba T-Head, and they are definitely interested in contributing to upstream. I believe that this is an initial success, and T-Head would do more work/patches for improving.

I myself is from the PLCT Lab, an engineering group inside the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The PLCT Lab is also porting AOSP to RISC-V (see https://github.com/aosp-riscv/ ). We are always upstream first :)

Anup Patel

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Jan 21, 2021, 8:48:38 PM1/21/21

to Wei Wu (吴伟), Karim Yaghmour, RISC-V SW Dev

Hi Wei Wu,

This is awesome progress.

I would suggest to extend QEMU virt machine so that it has all required devices for asop-riscv and support asop-riscv on QEMU virt machine.

This will make the asop-riscv efforts popular among Android developers.

At the moment, I think QEMU virt machine lacks a display so maybe a simple (fixed) framebuffer would suffice and rest of the devices can be all VirtIO.

Best Regards,

Anup Patel

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Wei Wu (吴伟)

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Jan 21, 2021, 8:59:07 PM1/21/21

to Anup Patel, Karim Yaghmour, RISC-V SW Dev

Hi Anup,

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 9:48 AM Anup Patel <an...@brainfault.org> wrote:

Hi Wei Wu,

This is awesome progress.

I would suggest to extend QEMU virt machine so that it has all required devices for asop-riscv and support asop-riscv on QEMU virt machine.

This will make the asop-riscv efforts popular among Android developers.

At the moment, I think QEMU virt machine lacks a display so maybe a simple (fixed) framebuffer would suffice and rest of the devices can be all VirtIO.

Agree. T-Head already has its QEMU for it. I think they might release the QEMU support in near future, either in binary packages or open source.

There are some other companies working on extending QEMU/RISC-V for Android, including the PLCT Lab and Nuclei System. I am optimistic that we may be able to run AOSP on a RISC-V simulator soon.

Best Regards,
Anup Patel

On Fri, 22 Jan, 2021, 07:11 Wei Wu (吴伟), <lazyp...@gmail.com> wrote:

Wei Wu (吴伟)

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Jan 23, 2021, 10:46:10 PM1/23/21

to RISC-V SW Dev

Hi all,

During the monthly OSDT Meetup, Chen Wang gave a talk about the quick analysis of the AOSP source code T-Head released this week.

There are some key opinions (takeaway):

- T-Head has opened complete patches. Other RISC-V companies are able to run AOSP on their own RV64GC soc based on T-Head's porting.

- Devices/Kernel Drivers/Simulators related modifications are dispatched in prebuilt/binary mode. This is a common practice in the AOSP community. Companies need to implement the BSP/HAL part itself.

- The source code of the toolchains used in the AOSP porting are not included, because they are not part of AOSP. Other companies may need to evaluate / modify RISCV toolchains by themself.

Again, Congratulations! Alibaba T-Head did really well.

[1] The slides could be download here (in Chinese Language):

https://github.com/hellogcc/OSDT-Slides/blob/master/20210124-OSDT-Meetup/wangchen-t-head-aosp-riscv.pdf

[2] The talk video will be upload here (in Chinese Language):

https://space.bilibili.com/296494084/video

On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 7:48 PM Wei Wu (吴伟) <lazyp...@gmail.com> wrote:

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