PLCT Lab Announces First Minimal Boot Milestone for Its RISC-V Android Port

The first step in getting AOSP running on RISC-V hardware, the platform is now bootable to a minimal shell using RISC-V in QEMU.

Work to port the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to the free and open source instruction set architecture (ISA) has reached a major milestone: It's now possible to boot the Android kernel and launch a shell.

"The full name of our project is “AOSP for RISC-V”, and all the source code is currently opened on GitHub," writes PLCT Lab's Chen Wang of the effort. "The ultimate goal of our project is to port Android on RISC-V. Of course, this goal is huge."

"But in the short term, we still have a small goal, which is described in one sentence: Based on the RISC-V platform, realize the kernel part of Android running on QEMU, and run the Android Shell. Based on the above objectives, the specific analysis is to realize a minimal Android system. The meaning of 'minimal system' here is the so-called 'bootable UNIX-style command line operating system.'"

Even getting that far is major work: Google, which maintains the Android Open Source Project and the proprietary Android mobile platform it has built on top of it, has thus far shown little public interest in supporting RISC-V itself. Now, though, the community-driven project has confirmed that it has reached its initial goal.

"The first milestone of Android RISC-V porting has been achieved: Now you can boot up the kernel and launch a shell on the QEMU/RV64G," Wei Wu announced to the RISC-V software developers' mailing list earlier this month, referring to the QEMU emulator and its 64-bit RISC-V RV64G ISA implementation — available to all for trying RISC-V software development without the need for dedicated hardware.

Initially, the only instructions on how to try out the build were published in Chinese — but author Chen Wang has since published a guide in English, walking the reader step-by-step through applying the project's patches and building the minimal AOSP system using an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS host.

"At present, the minimal system only provides very little functions," Wang admits. "Although it is still very imperfect, it can be run after all, and it is definitely a 'minimal Android system.' What’s more, it is also an Android running on the RISC-V architecture platform!"

Wang's full guide is available on the PLCT Lab website, while the port patches can be found on the project's GitHub repository.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
Latest articles
Sponsored articles
Related articles
Latest articles
Read more
Related articles