Sadly, I’m not waiting for a risc-v android. I’m waiting for a risc-v pinePhone, and that seems really far right now.
I suppose the PinePhone OS (or any other OS) could be ported to that Android phone if it becomes popular enough.
No, you need hardware to be designed on purpose to work with FLOSS OSes. Pine64 does a lot of work to select the correct hardware for this.
Android is just Linux with some patches and a crappy userland sprinkled on top. Why should you not be able to run whatever you want if the bootloader isn’t locked? Pine64 tries to use components that have a documentation you can access without an NDA. If you want a libre smartphone you are fucked anyways since you’ll have trouble finding a modem that doesn’t require loading a non-free firmware :(
Non-free device drivers that only work with outdated kernel versions are the main problem with porting GNU/Linux to Android phones. You can try to patch around that for a while with compatibility layers like Halium, but usually not very long.
Ideally I’d like a RISC-V board that could be slotted into a Fairphone!
A man can dream, after all.
(You probably know already, but: Pine64 are dipping their toes into RISC-V… they just don’t seem to be going all out for the new architecture… yet.)
I think I’ve read something, however, as mentioned, that seems far. pine64 just launched recently its arm new pro phone for developers (not consumers yet), which improves some specs, as to to be doing major changes, like adopting new ISA, but yes, I seem to remember reading about their interest, and perhaps something happening underneath, but I guess not their focus at the moment with the recent launch of several arm based products…
They developed the pinecil - a soldering iron which has a RISC-V chip in it.
There’s also - I think it’s called - the pinecone… a board for backporting bluetooth / wifi etc. The BL602?
I hope pine64 jumps on the RISC-V party soon!
