Is there a bootstrapping issue here that Google can solve? It seems to me that the market for fast RISC-V processors is pretty small until there’s a consumer-friendly OS to run on the things, and of course only hobbyists will port their OS to a slow chip.
The ecosystem could slowly grow through hobbyists, niche devices, special-purpose compute appliances, blah blah… or some entity with unlimited money could just do the short-term irrational thing and jumpstart one side of the equation.
Linux support is quite solid already, and Debian (largest Linux distribution) builds over 95% of packages for this architecture. The only major runtime missing is dotnet.
This is about Android, which is very different from your average Linux system.
Sure. But if google gets the Linux kernel inside android to run well on Risc-V, that's going to be a large fraction of the work required to get Linux running. Not a ton architecture specific code in user space, especially since things like gcc, glibc, and friends are already ported.
I quite like Linux, but it doesn’t appear to be super popular among consumers. (This is not intended as a slight — IMO open source works best as a community project by developers, trying to spread it to people who aren’t able to contribute doesn’t really help either party that much).
Yep! This is why, despite not being an Android user, I’m (speculatively) happy to see Google kind of kick-starting the software ecosystem. Hopefully that’ll lead to higher performance hardware, and it’ll eventually hit the point where we want to run proper desktop Linux on it.
Still some potential pitfalls, hopefully we won’t get super locked down hardware (I’m under the impression that that’s a bit of a problem in the phone universe).
How do you define Linux? The Linux kernel runs on billions of Android phones. It's also runs on chromebooks which sell in high volumes to kids in the K-12 schools.
I was responding to someone else who’d talked about Linux, so I think the question is better directed their way.
However, they talked about Debian and put it in the category of Linux, and then specifically contrasted against Android as a separate thing, so I think we’re informally talking about the conventional desktop Gnu+SystemD+Too many other groups to list Linux ecosystem.
Also depends on how stringent the EU is going to be about enforcing their laws. If iOS/Android/Windows/Intel/(Ryzen?)/Huawei... do get banned in practice rather than just in theory, this opens up quite the field for Linux/RISC-V !
The ecosystem could slowly grow through hobbyists, niche devices, special-purpose compute appliances, blah blah… or some entity with unlimited money could just do the short-term irrational thing and jumpstart one side of the equation.