The RISC-V processor architecture has been shaking up the tech world since US sanctions. Lots of players are looking towards this processor and porting software. The last announcement is that of Alibaba Cloud which evokes the port of Android on RISC-V. The objective is to carry the essential layers and to demonstrate the relevance of the development and the interest of offering this OS on a Risc-V processor. The Chinese giant announced the first developments a year ago with the porting of a shell. T-Head, a subsidiary of Alibaba, had participated in the GUI prototype.
The development therefore progresses more or less quickly. The announcement of the last few days relates to Android 12 while the prototypes were running with Android 10.
However, the work is enormous because you have to port the code, adapt and optimize each layer. And it concerns kernel, Bionic part, RISC-V support in CLANG/LLVM, add build in NDK, etc.
In the current state of the project, Android 12 is far from being usable and the objective does not exceed the technological demonstration. It will probably take 12 to 24 months to hope for an operational OS if that is the final goal.
The riscv-.org site had published an excellent post on the porting and the problems it raises: https://riscv.org/blog/2021/11/how-alibaba-is-porting-risc-v-to- the-android-os-guoyin-chen-alibaba/
