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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

I haven't thought about it much, but first reaction - I get that it might be a good candidate to get volumes up but isn't it kind of self-defeating? Why would you want to run android, of all things, on an open CPU?

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Android is the leading OS for mobile phones and tablets. It is also quite popular in embedded for devices that have a screen, mostly as a side-effect of its dominance in mobile. It can often be easier to get graphics and touch drivers/support for Android compared to Linux. It is also easier to find developers who can write a custom Android app for the UI than any of the typical embedded/Linux UI frameworks, and the tooling is better.

Besides high quality hardware support and device availability. The fact of the matter is the core of Android is OPEN SOURCE. I can and have built every last bit of software on my Moto X4 thanks to LineageOS, which is based on AOSP.

wow. even the drivers? say, for the radio?

The drivers for the radio are generally open, it's the radio firmware that isn't.

ah right. the point still stands, though. i was also under the impression that many of the device drivers that ship with with modern android phones are closed source. see the step in building lineage "Extract proprietary blobs"[0]

[0] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/payton/build#extract-prop...

Those are the firmware pieces running on the cores that aren't even running Android as their OS for the most part, so it's not really applicable to the root discussion.

Not the parent commenter that you are replying to, but yes LineageOS even gets the radios working. Its a full mobile android distribution that works great

i know, it's what i use daily :) i'm fairly confident they have no builds that are "blobless" though - part of the build process is to extract proprietary code blobs from manufacturer images which are not open source, see [0]

[0] https://wiki.lineageos.org/proprietary_blobs.html

Yes thats true, unfortunately GSM radios are all proprietary still

It's extensible, so they could in theory introduce something to the ISA which would give them a competitive advantage, maybe even a publicly available extension that their competitors have simply left out, e.g. one of the crypto extensions.

There's also the benefit of being more flexible with teams who work on your SoC. With RISC-V, everyone has an ISA license, so they can contract, team-up, collaborate, or do basically anything they want, in order to work on their chips.

This also means that acquisitions are a much richer market than they are with other ISAs; in part because you don't have to justify the cost in time, money, and uncertainty of licensing or planning to license ARM.

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