Alibaba's RISC-V processor Xuantie 910 can run smoothly on Android 10

As an open source processor instruction, RISC-V has a promising future. It is currently mainly used in AI, embedded and other fields. It has little presence in the mobile phone field, mainly because the Android system does not support RISC-V enough.

Today, Alibaba announced an important progress. Its Pingtou Ge Semiconductor completed the porting of Android 10 to RISC-V and open-sourced all related codes.

According to the information released by the Pingtou Ge community, the Android 10 system can already run smoothly on the Xuantie 910 chip.

It is understood that Pingtou Ge has implemented support for the RISC-V architecture based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The Android software stack mainly includes nearly a thousand software packages at five levels: system kernel, hardware abstraction, runtime, framework layer, and application. The porting work related to the processor architecture mainly includes three parts: **native library and ART support, Linux kernel support, and build system support:

Native library and ART support: Complete RISC-V architecture support for software packages such as bionic, ART, Clang/LLVM, V8, NDK, VNDK, OpenGL, etc.: Add support for dynamic linking, system calls, and floating-point math libraries for bionic; based on ART, implement DEX real-time interpretation and execution, dex2oat, JNI calls, and JIT compilation optimization for the RISC-V architecture, greatly improving the execution efficiency of JAVA programs on the RISC-V platform.

Linux kernel support: Improved Clang/LLVM's compilation support for the Linux kernel, fixed a large number of Clang/LLVM issues, and adapted the RISC-V architecture Linux kernel to the Android system for the first time.

Build system support: **Android's compilation framework is mainly composed of blueprint and soong. Pingtou Ge integrates the compilation framework, pre-compiled tool chain, local method library, simulator, application and service modules, and realizes the support of RISC-V architecture for Android build system for the first time. 

In July 2019, Pingtou Ge Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Alibaba, released the Hematite 910 processor, which is also the most powerful RISC-V processor in the industry.

It is reported that Hematite 910 can be used to design and manufacture high-performance end chips, which can be applied in fields such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and autonomous driving.

It is understood that the single-core performance of XuanTie 910 reaches 7.1 Coremark/MHz, and the main frequency reaches 2.5GHz, which is more than 40% higher than the best RISC-V processor in the industry.